How do you share a Google Doc?
Written by Cameron James·November 7, 2026Quick answer
To share a Google Doc, open it, click Share, type the email address of the person you want, choose Viewer, Commenter or Editor, and click Send. To share by link instead, open General access, switch it from Restricted to "Anyone with the link", pick a role and click Copy link.
Key facts
- In Google Docs, click Share, enter the recipient's email address, choose a role, optionally add a message, then click Send. You can untick the box to skip the notification email.
- There are three roles. Viewers can only open the file, commenters can open and comment, and editors can open, comment and edit.
- General access has three levels. Restricted means only people with access can open the file, including anyone who inherits access from a shared folder or shared drive. Anyone with the link means anyone holding it can open the file without signing in to a Google Account. Public means anyone can find the file through Google Search.
- Viewers and commenters can download the file by default, but the owner can turn that off.
- Editors can also share the file and, by default, change its permissions. They cannot change the owner.
- Sharing gives someone access. It does not tell you whether they opened the file, and Google's view tracking is narrow.
Share with named people, or share a link
Open the doc and click Share. Type an email address, choose a role and send. That is the tighter route, because only the people you add can open the file, and it is the one I would use whenever I know who the reader is.
If you do not know who will end up with it, open General access and change Restricted to "Anyone with the link". Choose the role, click Copy link, paste it wherever you like. The risk is obvious once you say it out loud: the link is now the only gate, and it travels wherever the message does.
Pick the role before you hit send
The role is the setting people rush. Viewer is read-only, Commenter lets people leave notes without touching the text, and Editor lets them change the document and, by default, share it onwards. For a quote, a report or anything finished, Viewer is nearly always right. If you want everyone to work on the same file, I covered that separately in how to share a document that everyone can edit.
Sharing is not the same as knowing it was read
When I was sending proposals as Drive links all day, I treated "shared" as "delivered". It is not. The sharing panel shows who has access, and for anyone outside your company you mostly cannot see whether they opened it, which I went through in can you track who views a Google Drive link.
Google Docs is good for documents people work on together. For a finished document you want someone to read, I would export it to PDF and share that. LiveDocument lets you add a short video walkthrough to the PDF, share it as one link and see which pages got read. It is not a co-editing tool, so keep using Google Docs for the drafting.
The Bottom Line
Add named people when you know who they are, use a link when you do not, and pick the lowest role that does the job. Viewer is the right default for anything you want read rather than rewritten.
Written by Cameron James