How can I share a Google Docs spreadsheet?

Here at Ask Dave Taylor I'm pretty agnostic about basic office computing tools, whether it's an operating system (I lean more towards Mac OS X but have Windows XP, Vista and Win7 systems around, along with some Linux gear), word processing tools or even a spreadsheet. Heck, I've built more spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel than I even want to count, and will confess that I enjoy the process, strangely enough.

Sharing documents has always been crude, at best, and for many of my books the projects were characterized by lots and lots of ".doc" files emailed back and forth. And that was during the era where you needed to be paranoid about the size of your file attachments too. Quite a pain!

Where this gets even more difficult is when you want to share a document -- or spreadsheet or presentation file -- with more than one person simultaneously. Unless you have a round-robin sharing approach, which can take weeks to fully resolve, it's exceptionally hard to incorporate feedback from more than one person in a coherent fashion.

That's why as I've gotten involved with the Modern Media Man Summit (a cool conference, click the link and check it out!) I have been appreciative of our shared Google Docs archive and materials.

Our call for speakers, for example, is actually a Google Docs form embedded on a page, with the information people submit saved on the backend as a spreadsheet. Easy, fast to produce, and it sure makes it easier to manage than having a mail folder full of partially-filled-out applications!

That spreadsheet I wanted to share with the rest of the team, so here's how I did it. You'll be able to see how you can proceed by following along, I'm sure...

When looking at my spreadsheet, there's a "Share" link on the top right:

Click on it and a small menu of options pops up:

I'll invite people to share the document, uh, spreadsheet, with me by choosing the first option. Google Docs now gives me an area where I can specify who I want to invite and enter a message to send them too:

You can see that it taps into your Gmail address book (if you have one) and offers autocomplete, which sure makes things easy. In this case, I'm adding conference chair Jim Turner to the list.

I add the names I want, check the darn useful "Send a copy to myself" box, and click "Send"...

At this stage you can see that I can choose what level of access to allow different people, which is very helpful as in this instance I don't want lots of people having the ability to edit or even delete rows of information from the spreadsheet.

The options?

You can easily set one person to have edit access while others have read-only and you can even turn someone's access off for a period and re-enable it later if you felt the need. Nice, straightforward.

I click on "Save & Close" and an email invitation is sent to each person on the access list. My copy of it gives you a sense of the layout:

There you go. Very nice job by Google creating the Google Docs environment, and I can't really imagine how it could be much easier to share these docs with multiple people. Good luck with your own document management efforts, and we'll keep an eye on what Microsoft is doing with its own online document sharing tools that'll be included in the next version of MS Office too.