Google Docs Tutorials - Part 17 - Emailing Documents
During this Google Docs tutorial and lesson, learn how to email your Google Doc. Once you have a completed document, you may want to share it with others. Traditionally people have shared documents by printing them, or by attaching them to e-mail and sending them to the intended recipient.
One of the great things about Google Docs is that it has the share option that allows you to collaborate on your documents in ways that you normally cannot do with other programs. However, there may be times that you will want to use the traditional method of e-mailing documents.
To begin, open the document you would like to share. In the upper right-hand corner, you will see a Share button. Click this and choose the option for Email as attachment….
The Email Document windows opens (see below) where you fill in the email information. As you type in the To: box, email addresses you have previously entered will display here for you to select. Also, if you have contacts saved in your Google account, you can click on the link Choose from contacts.
Then you have a couple of options: you can Paste the document itself into the email message (selecting this button will paste your actual document inside the message), or you can Attach document as:, and then you will click on the drop-down menu to choose the file type that you want to send. The type of file you wish to send depends on the type of files you have created in Google Docs. As discussed in Chapter 1, the available file formats include Microsoft Word Document, Open Document format, Portable Document Format (PDF), or Rich Text Format. Most of these file formats require specific software to access the document. For this reason, you may want to select Rich Text Format (.rtf) because almost any word processor can open this file extension.
In the Email Document window, there is already a subject for you, which defaults to the name of your document. You can change this as necessary. Finally, you can type an email message in the text box provided. For example, you could type, “Here is the Banana Project file that I promised.” The final checkbox exists to give you the option of sending yourself a carbon copy (CC) of the email. If you check this box, your carbon copied email will be sent to the email address you used when creating your Google Docs account. When you are satisfied with your email settings, you can click the Send button. The message will then be sent to the email address you supplied.
You have now experienced an easy way to send documents from within Google Docs; but, as previously mentioned, Google Docs has some extra tools to help you share documents. These new tools can prevent you from having different copies of a document floating around on the internet. You will learn about sharing documents in the next section.
