In these lessons, you'll learn about shared files in Google Drive. In this lesson, you'll learn about sharing a file in Google Drive. If you have one or more files or a folder that you want to share with certain people or groups of people, sharing options in Google Drive will allow you to share files without having to worry about sending attachments via email. Files that are shared will be shared right from your Google Drive, with downloading of files only being optional to the person or persons being shared to. First, let's access Google Drive. On the Google homepage, click on the nine dot waffle grid icon located at the top right-hand corner of the page. On the menu that appears, click on Drive. You will now be at your My Drive page. Now, I need to find a file that I want to share. I'm going to go into my 01 Documents folder, and I'm going to right-click on this Hello world file. Now, I will click on Share. Right now, I see that I'm the only one that has access to this file. It has my name and my email address, and it says that I'm the file owner. To share it, type in the email address of the person you would like to share the file with, or you can type in the name of someone in your organization. I will type an email address here. Once you're done, and since it remembers me doing this before, click on the email address that you were going to be sharing with. The first thing that I want to do now is set the permissions the person should have. Right now, they have editor permissions. This will allow them to fully modify the file just as if they were the file editor. You can change this if needed, though. If I select Commenter, the person I shared with will be able to view the file contents and make comments or make suggestions about the contents. However, they will not be able to make changes to the file contents. Now, if I select Viewer, the person I shared with will only be able to view the file contents. They will not be able to make comments or any kinds of changes to the file contents. For the sake of this example, I will leave them as Editor. You'll also see that there are specific settings that you can choose here. You can make it so that editors can change permissions and share or viewers and commenters can see the option to download, print and copy. I'm going to go ahead and leave these options checked, and I'm going to click on Back. You'll also see a box here that says "Notify people." If I leave that checked, the person I shared with will receive an email stating that the file has been shared with them. In the box below, you can type a message that will accompany the email that will be sent. Unchecking the box will share the file, but the person will not receive a notification. The message box will also disappear as well. I will leave the box checked, and I'm going to add a message. Now, I will click on Send. The file has now been shared with the person that I specified. Now, if I right-click on the file and click on Share again, I can see that that person has been listed. This person now has access to this file. It also says that this person is an editor. If I click on Editor, you'll get a dropdown menu and now, you can change them to either a viewer or a commenter. If you click on Transfer ownership, you can give a person ownership of a file. Please note that when you do this, you will lose ownership of the file. Be careful with whom you grant this to, as they can restrict your access or completely delete the file. You can also remove access to that person. I'm going to go ahead and click off the dialog box to close it. Another way to share is by sending a link. To do this, right-click on the file or folder that you want to create a link to and click on Get link. You will see the Get link dialog box appear. By default, the Get link option is, usually, set to "Restricted." With this setting, only the person or persons you shared the file to will be able to access this link. If you want anyone with the link to be able to view the file or folder, click on where it says "Restricted," and then click on Anyone with the link. Notice that doing this will also let you decide whether anyone with this link can be the viewer, the commenter or editor. Take caution when changing the setting, as it would allow anyone in the public with the link to have whatever level of access you decide to set here. When you're ready, click on Copy link. The link can now be pasted into an email or any group messaging apps that you may be using. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next lesson, where we will learn about adding members to a shared file.
