How to Share a Google Doc: 3 Ways!

The most common way to share your Google Doc is to share it directly with people or groups.

• Locate and click the blue Share button at the top-right of the Google Doc.
• Choose whether to share with people and groups or copy link to share.
• Click Done when finished adding ALL people and/or groups.

Sharing a Google Doc with specific people or groups

To share a Google Doc with people or groups, start typing their name or email into the search field. If they are contacts that you've used in the past, members of your organization, or other names that might have appeared in your Gmail, then they or the group should appear and be clickable.

Sharing a Google Doc link

Your Google Doc has a unique link that can be shared with anyone. You can copy the link in this "Share" screen and then paste it into an email or chat. You can also restrict link sharing access within an organization.

Where you create a folder in Google Docs is the same place you go to move your Google Document to a folder in Google Drive. When you share an entire folder in Google Drive, everything in the folder is accessible to whomever it's shared. So to easily share Google Docs, create a shared folder in Google Drive, then move your Google Doc into it.

To move a Google into a shared Google Drive folder

• Click on the small folder icon next to the name of the Google Doc file.
• Choose the shared folder from the list.
• Select Move here to move the Google Doc into the selected folder.

The final option to share a Google Doc is to make it public by publishing it to the web. Essentially, this makes the document findable and viewable to anyone with the URL. (This is the most basic form of web publishing, after all.)

Many people choose this option when they want to embed a Google Doc into another webpage or source.

To make a Google Doc public on the web:

• Go to File.
• Choose Publish to the web.

Then you'll be given options for publishing the Google Doc. Don't worry about all of them just yet.

• Select Publish to set the Google Doc as published.

Now you can fetch either the Link (URL) or Embed code from the document. Click on either to switch.

You can also change whether you want changes you make to the document to auto-publish and update on the webpage. Lastly, you can restrict access to the webpage to an organization if you want.

How to embed a Google Doc

The above is an embedded Google Doc. It's pretty basic, but it serves to show what it can look like on a webpage.

To embed a Google Doc on a webpage:

• Fetch the Embed code by publishing the Google Doc (see above).
• Insert the code into your web editor.

If you need to share your Google Doc in another format, then you'll need to convert it. We've got guides to show you how to convert your Google Doc to a Word document and how to convert your Google Doc to a PDF.

Need to sign it?

If you need to sign your Google Doc before you share it, then check out our guide on how to do this easily.