Learn how to share a Google Doc during this tutorial. As previously mentioned, one of the most remarkable functions of Google Docs are the Sharing tools. With the current document, you have already learned how to e-mail and print it out, but now you need to learn how to take advantage of these advanced tools so that you can collaborate on the document with other team members.
You will need an open document in order to proceed with the following exercise. If you do not have one open, you should create a new document, or go to your Google Docs list and open a document from there. Once open, you will click on the Share button (as shown to the right), and select the Share with others option.
A Share this document window opens up (as seen below), where you can invite people to share your document as collaborators or as viewers. A collaborator is someone who can actually work on the document, make changes, edit, format, etc. A viewer can only view the document. On the right side of the window, you can click on the Preview document as a viewer link. This shows you what a viewer will see if they are sent the document. Viewers can only do a few things in the document. As you can see, there are only the File, View, and Help menus available to a viewer; viewers cannot edit the document at all.
To allow others to work on the document, you have to actually add them as collaborators. To do this, select the as collaborators button, and then in the text box below, you will type the email addresses of those you want to be able to use the document. You may want to experiment by typing a personal email address now. If you want to add more than one collaborator, separate their email addresses with commas.
You also have some other options under Advanced permissions. For example, it is possible to allow collaborators to invite others colleague to review shared documents. This would involve selecting the check box next to Collaborators may invite others. This feature would be useful in an instance where you might invite a professor as a collaborator, and he/she has a teaching assistant that might also need access to your shared document. Selecting this check box would allow your professor to extend an invitation to his teaching assistant as a collaborator. Under normal circumstances, you would want to protect your documents and would leave this box unchecked.
The second available check box is Invitations may be used by anyone, which allows you to forward your document invitation to a mailing list. This check box allows a large group of people to be added as collaborators at one time.
Before you click the Invite collaborators button, you should note the message at the top, right-hand side of the window. You will see the message that declares: This document is not shared. Currently, there are no other users sharing this document. If there were any collaborators or viewers, they would be listed here.
After you click on the Invite collaborators button, there may be a slight delay while Google Docs prepares to share your document. A dialog box called Tell these people about the document? will open, and will list the email addresses of your invitees.
The Subject: will default to the document title, but can be edited at your discretion. Also, you can type a message in the text box. For the exercise, type, “Here is the document for you to edit.”, as indicated to the right. Then you have the check box option to Paste the document itself into the email message which you will leave unchecked. There is also a CC me check box option, to send yourself a carbon copy. The command buttons at the bottom are to Send or Skip sending invitation. To complete this exercise, click Send so that an email is sent out to the invitee.
Once your invitation is sent, the right-hand side of the Share this document window will change to reflect that This document is currently shared.
This document now has a list of two collaborators; me – the owner, and the person that I sent the invitation to. Your screen should list yourself, the owner, and any invitees. You can remove all of these users if you want to by clicking the remove all link, or just remove the new invitee you added by clicking the “×” next to their name.
It also adds a nice convenient option for you to email all of the collaborators on your document by clicking the Email collaborators link. This opens a window where you can send an email to all of the collaborators. If you use the Google Calendars application, you can create an event by clicking the Create event with collaborators link. To return to your document, click on the << Back to editing link in the top left-hand corner of the window.
This would be a good time to return to the Google Docs list of documents to examine how adding collaborators has changed the view. You can either close this document by clicking the Save & Close button or you can use the link for Docs Home at the top right-hand side of the window, as seen below.
As you can see below, the document “Banana Tree” now shows that belongs to the folder “Banana Project”, which is highlighted in yellow. Google Docs also lists the users that are working on the document, and names of users that have been invited as document collaborators. The owner of the document is listed in a darker color, and the collaborators name is in a gray or a lighter color. In the date column, Google Docs also specifies the owner of the document. The document “Holidays in America” listed below, represents what it looks like when you are a collaborator on a document owned by another user.
To share multiple documents at once, select them on the document list, and then click the Share button (as shown to the right).
A window similar to that discussed previously allows you to insert e-mail addresses, subject text, and an email message as previously done. You can also choose whether to add the invitees as Collaborators or as Viewers. When you are satisfied with the window content, click Send invitation.
Regarding collaboration, there is a limitation to the number of simultaneous collaborators allowed to work simultaneously on a Google Docs document. While you can send any number of invitations to collaborate on a document, a maximum of 10 people can log on and access a document as collaborators at any one time. After 10 users have logged on to Google Docs to work on a document, additional users will be limited to viewing the document at that time. Therefore, you can invite more than 10 people to collaborate on a document, but simultaneously only 10 people can collaborate at a time.
The advantage of the Sharing option built into Google Docs is that it allows you to have one document with different revisions. You do not have to send a bunch of emails, have your document in 12, 13, or 14 different places on the web, and then try to guess in your e-mail or on your computer which document is the latest. You just have your document living in one place, you have your collaborators, and you will be able to see what changes they have made.
When you open a document with several collaborators, you can always open the Tools menu and click on Revision history as done in a previous section of this manual. Once again, you can see all of the changes that have been made in the document. You can click any of these revisions and see stage the document was at. Also you can click the check box of different revisions, and click on Compare Checked to see the actual differences between versions.
When you store your document in a central place, and have a bunch of different people working on it, the Comments feature (discussed previously) definitely comes in handy. Collaborators working on a document will see the comments and either answer them, make changes based on them, or address them in other ways.
This section has illustrated the tremendous advantages of Sharing and shown you how share a document in Google Docs.
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