Collaboration
Sharing
Share to individuals
This is the most common and simple way to collaborate on a document in Google Drive. You grant access to individual users to edit, comment or view a document. This is great for collaborating with classmates and other team members. You can grant permission to individual users in two ways; from the folder list and from within an open document.
Folder List
To add a collaborator to a document from the folder list,
Right click on the file you want to share and click Share.
Create the list of users by typing their email addresses in the Add people field.
Click the drop down to the right of the Add people field to select which kind of access you want to provide. There are three options: Editor, Commenter, and Viewer. Select which level of permissions you want to grant.
As soon as you start typing email addresses the Add a note field will appear and the Notify people box will become visible. The notify check box is ticked by default. Most of the time you will want to fill out the note field and leave the notify boxed checked.
If you want to send the note to the people in the list, click Send and permissions will be granted and an email containing your note will be sent to the people in the list. If you don't want to notify people that you have shared the document with them, uncheck the Notify box and the button will now say Share. Click the Share button and permissions will be set.
Note: all of these people will get the same permission. If you want different permissions for different users you will need to create separate lists for each permission type.
From an Open Document
There are two ways to access the sharing options from an already open document. Click "File" and then click "Share" (1st option on the menu) or even easier, click the "Share" button on the top right of the page. Both of these methods open the exact same dialog box mentioned in the "Folder List" option above. Follow the instructions listed above to grant permissions.
Link Sharing
Every shared file will have a unique URL to allow access directly.
Share a Link With Specific People
To get a copy of the URL to send to your collaborators without turning Link Sharing on,
Find the file in your file list.
Right click the file for which you want a URL and click on Get shareable link.
Click Copy link button.
Share a Link to a Wider Audience
The other option when sharing links is sharing to a much larger group of people rather than to specific people, or, sharing with specific people and with a wider audience at the same time. This would allow you to have a group of specific people that can edit a document but allow a much larger group, even the entire internet, to only view the file. There are a couple of ways to setup link sharing but this tutorial will only cover one of the options. To setup link sharing to a wider audience:
Open the file that you want to share.
Click Share.
Click on the Get link area.
By default the sharing setting is set to Restricted. Click on the down arrow to the right of Restricted. You'll see options for UW and Anyone with a link.
Restricted means only people added can open with this link.
If you select UW, then anyone with a UW email address can open this link, and by default the Viewer permission is selected, but you can change it to Commenter or Editor.
If you select Anyone with a link, then anyone can open this link, and by default the Viewer permission is selected, but you can change it to Commenter or Editor.
Click Done and the permissions are shared with everyone in the group.
View Activity
When working on shared files, you may wonder how often collaborators are accessing the shared file. You can get some basic information about this question by clicking the "Activity dashboard" icon (looks kind of like a little lightning bolt) in the top right of the document. This just gives some basic information about last accessed date, sharing history etc..
Comments
One of the best features of Google documents is the ability to make comments about areas of the document so that collaborators can work together to improve the overall quality of the document. Additionally, you can leave a comment that assigns a specific task to a collaborator. Read on to learn how to add comments and create tasks in a Google document.
Comments in Docs
Adding comments to a Google Doc can be accomplished in three different ways; using the Insert menu; using the Add a comment icon (a plus sign) that appears to the right of the page when you select the text where you want to add a comment or, right click on the selected text and click Comment from the popup menu. To add a comment:
Select the text where you want to add a comment.
Click on the Insert menu item and click Comment or, click the plus sign that appears on the right after you select your text or right click on the selected text and click Comment from the popup menu.
Type in your comment and click the Comment button.
Comments in Sheets
Comments in Sheets are very similar to comments in Docs with some minor differences. Note that comments in Sheets can only be made for an entire cell in a sheet. To add a comment in Sheets:
Select the cell where you want to leave a comment.
Click on the Insert menu and then click on Comment or right click in the cell and select Comment in the popup menu.
Type in your comment and click the Comment button. A small gold triangle in the top right corner of the cell indicates that there is a comment in that cell.
Comments will become visible when you mouse over a cell
Comments in Slides
Adding comments to a Google Slides presentation is nearly identical to adding comments in a Google doc. To add comments to a Slides presentation:
Select the text where you want to add a comment.
Click on the Insert menu item and click Comment or right click on the selected text and select Comment in the popup menu.
Type in your comment and click the Comment button.
Resolving Comments
Once comments have been dealt with you should resolve them. To resolve a comment, mouse over the comment and click the Resolve button. Once you click the Resolve button the comment goes away and is stored in the Comment history. You can access the comment history by clicking on the Open comment history button found just to the left of the Share button at the top right of the screen.
Tasks
Assigning a task to a collaborator is nearly identical to adding a comment. Go through the same process to add a comment and when the blank comment box appears:
Enter the email address of the person for whom the task will be assigned.
As soon as you type the @ sign, Google will search your recent contacts to try and find the correct address and will popup a suggestion if it finds one. If it does find the correct person, click the suggestion to add them to the comment. If you type in the full email address and Google doesn't make a suggestion, add a plus sign before the email address to force Google to assign the task to that email address.
Finish adding any additional comment information.
Tick the box next to the person that has been assigned.
Click the Assign button.
If the person already has edit permission to the file, Google will send a notification and change the appearance of the comment so it says "Assigned to" at the top of the comment box with a check mark out to the right. If the person doesn't have permissions to access the file, Google will give you the opportunity to share the document with the individual you have selected.
When a task has been completed, make sure you or the person assigned the task clicks the check mark to flag the task as completed. As soon as you click the check mark the task disappears and is stored in the comment history.
Shared Drives
Each user in G Suite has their own Drive. All documents and files in this Drive are owned by you unless somebody has shared a document with you and it can be found under the Shared with me link in the left navigation bar. One of the big problems with individual Drives is that if you leave the organization, what happens to all of the stuff that you own that really needs to stay at the institution? In this scenario you would need to transfer ownership to your replacement prior to you leaving the organization.
The solution to this is to create "Shared Drives" and add users to these "Shared Drives". In this scenario, all the files are owned by the shared drive, meaning that if somebody leaves the organization, all of the files they have worked on are retained by the organization and no effort is needed to transfer ownership of institutional files. It also stops the scenario where an upset employee deletes everything on the way out the door as anything deleted in the shared drive can be retrieved by the G Suite administrator.
Shared drives can be used by teams of students for project work so that all relevant files are retained and easily accessible by everybody in the group. You can have as many shared drives as you like and can be a member of numerous shared drives as well. To create a shared drive:
Login to your Google Drive account
Click on the Shared drives link in the left navigation bar.
If you have never created a shared drive before, Google will show you a large CREATE SHARED DRIVE button in the center of the screen. If you already have access to shared drives, they will show up in the list when you click the Shared drives link in the left nav bar. To create a new shared drive if you already have shared drives in your list, click the + New button at the top left or right click and click New shared drive....
Give your new shared drive a descriptive name.
Click the Create button.
Click the Manage members link near the top right of the page just.
Add the email addresses of the people that you want to add to the shared drive.
Click the down arrow next to the text that says "content manager". This list shows you the various permission types a user can have. The default is "content manager" and this provides permissions to add, edit, move and delete any file in the shared drive. For most collaborative purposes, this is what you would assign to new users. If you wanted to have another user that can manage the members list and change the settings on the shared drive, give them the "Manager" permissions.
After setting the permissions for the new members you can create a message and use the Send button to add them to the shared drive and send them the message you created. If you don't want/need to send a message, tick the Skip sending notification box and the Send button will change to an Add. Click Add to just add the new members and when they next login to Drive they will see the new shared drive in their Shared drives list.
Use the same process to add more members if need be. To manage existing members, click on the link that says "x members" where x is the number of members in the shared drive.
From this dialog box you can see all members and their associated permissions. You can easily manage permissions with the drop down list and you can also remove a member from the shared drive.
Shared Drive Notes
Users can only be added to the entire shared drive. You can't add users to a folder nested in the shared drive.
At this time, you can't share an entire folder inside a shared drive. Apparently this feature is coming but no date has been set.
You can share individual files to people who are not members of the shared drive. This works fine for a limited number of files but becomes cumbersome if you want to share lots of files.
If you really need to share an entire folder of files, it is probably better to work out of your personal Drive and share the folder from there.