How to Let Anyone Edit Google Docs File

Google Docs lets you share documents with extreme ease. It’s a very small process and shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to complete.

Giving editing rights of your documents should be done with caution. Anyone who has the link or permission can make any change they want and render your document useless.

Today, we’re going to explain how you can let anyone edit a Google Docs file.

How to grant edit access in Google Docs

First, open the document that you wish to share.

To open the sharing menu, either click the File menu from the toolbar (labeled 1) and press Share. Or, press the big blue share button on the right (labeled 2).

When the menu opens, click ‘Change’ at the bottom of it.

From here, do two things.

• Make sure ‘Anyone with the link’ is selected and NOT restricted.
• Allow edit access by clicking the ‘Viewer’ button and changing it to Editor.

Once the changes are made, anyone with a link to this document can edit it. If the don’t have the link, simply use the ‘Copy link’ button right above the sharing settings as in the picture above. Once copied, send them the link and they can start making edits.

You can also undo this by going through the same process again and changing the setting from ‘Editor’ to ‘Viewer’.

Share Google Docs file with specific people only

If you want to make sure that only specific people have access to the document, you can give them permission through email instead. This makes sure that they can’t send the edit link to anyone else.

To do this, just open the sharing menu from the above instructions. Then add the emails of the people in the ‘Add people and groups’ text box.

Once you enter the emails, you’ll see an option to the right of their names to give them specific permissions. The default permission will be ‘Viewer’. You need to change it to ‘Editor’ by clicking the button that will appear.

For more tips about Google products, check out all the different guides we’ve made!