Sharing and Collaboration: Permissions, Comments and Suggestions

1Three days before the deadline

The water-use report is almost finished. The ICT teacher, Mr Habimana, wants to read it and point out mistakes, but he must not change the students' work himself. The head of the Environment Club wants to read it but not touch it. And on Tuesday night someone in the group deleted the whole conclusion by accident, and nobody noticed until Wednesday.

Google Docs has a tool for each of these situations: roles that decide who may do what, comments and suggestions for feedback that the authors accept or reject, and a version history that can bring back yesterday's conclusion.

2Who can do what

3Sharing step by step

1. Click Share at the top right.
2. Specific people: type a name or email address, choose Viewer, Commenter or Editor, add a message if you like, and click Send. Each person gets an email with the link.
3. General access: under General access, keep Restricted, or choose Anyone with the link and set the role those people will have, then Copy link.
4. Change or remove someone's access later in the same box: open the menu beside their name.
5. Settings (the gear in the Share box): the owner can stop editors from changing permissions and sharing, and stop viewers and commenters from downloading, printing or copying.

A school account may not be allowed to share outside the school: that is a setting of the school's administrator, not a fault.

4Comments and suggestions

Comment: select the text, then click Add comment (or press Ctrl + Alt + M), type and click Comment. Others reply in the same thread. Type @ and a person's name or email address to notify them; tick Assign to to turn the comment into an action item, which emails that person. When the point is settled, click Resolve (the tick) to close the thread; it stays in the comment history.

Suggestion: open the mode menu at the right of the toolbar and choose Suggesting (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + X). Type as normal: added text appears in colour, deleted text is crossed out, and each change appears as a suggestion card in the margin. An editor clicks ✓ Accept or ✗ Reject on each card, or uses Tools → Review suggested edits to work through them or to accept or reject all of them at once. A commenter can only suggest; editors may choose either mode.

5Version history

Google Docs saves earlier states of the document as it goes. Open them from File → Version history → See version history, or by clicking Last edit at the top right. The panel lists versions by date and time, coloured by author. Click a version to see it with the changes highlighted, then:

• Restore this version to make it the current document again (the later versions are not lost: they stay in the list);
• Make a copy of it as a separate file;
• Name this version, for example "Submitted to teacher", so it is easy to find (Google allows up to 40 named versions per document).

Only people with edit access can browse the version history.

6Hands-on: review a classmate's document

1. Share your Club notice from lesson 2 with a classmate as Commenter, and ask for a copy of theirs in return.
2. In your classmate's document, switch to Suggesting and correct two things. Add one comment with a question, using @ and their name.
3. Back in your own document, accept one suggestion, reject one, reply to the comment and resolve it.
4. Open the version history, find the version from before the review, and name it "Before review".
5. Check General access: it should still be Restricted.