14 DAY TRIAL // One of Google Docs’ major touted features is sharing. It’s a unique advantage of having everything in the cloud and is great for organizations or groups that need to collaborate on documents. With the new document and spreadsheet editors, collaboration is done in real time in Google Docs. It works great, but getting to the point where you have the people you want working together wasn’t exactly simple. The sharing options were as confusing as they were powerful, so Google has finally revamped the sharing system, preserving the flexibility, but making everything a lot easier to understand.
“The ability to share my Google Docs is crucial to my productivity. My teammates and I often add comments to docs, collaboratively organize our feature-planning spreadsheet, and send links of interesting company presentations to each other. Like anyone, I want to make sure that I can share these materials with my colleagues easily and efficiently. This is why I’m happy to announce some improvements that make sharing your Docs easier while giving you even more control,” Vikki Chou, software engineer at Google Docs, announced.
Documents will now have three visibility settings, Private, Anyone with a link and Public on the web. A newly created document starts off as private. This means that only its creator has access to it. From there, you can invite specific people to collaborate or just to view the document.
The second sharing option is “Anyone with a link.” This is very similar to the unlisted videos option YouTube introduced not so long ago. The documents are practically public, there are no restrictions on who can see them, but you have to know the link to get to them, there’s no way to just stumble upon them.
Finally, you can set a document to Public, meaning that anyone will be able to access it. What’s more, it will be indexable by search engines, so it may show up in search results. The privacy setting of any document will show up as a link next to its name, so you can see it at a glance. The interface for inviting other people and seeing who has access has also been revamped and simplified.
The new sharing system will go live next week for everyone. Similar sharing options will be introduced for Google Apps users as well. You can check out the videos below to see what to expect. Eagle-eyed viewers will also spot the Cloud Clipboard button inside the new Docs document editor a feature that is not yet live for everyone, but is clearly in testing internally at Google.