The moment two people work on one document, a new set of problems appears. Most of them are avoided by sharing a link instead of sending copies.
When you email a document to four people, four separate versions now exist. Everyone edits their own, and someone has to merge them all by hand.
Share a link instead. In Google Drive or OneDrive, everyone opens the same file and sees each other's changes. There is one version, and it is always the current one.
When you share, choose the access deliberately: view for people who only need to read it, comment for people giving feedback, edit only for people who genuinely need to change it.
Four colleagues need to review a document.
What happens: Four versions come back with different changes, and somebody spends an afternoon merging them and probably loses an edit.
What happens: All four comment on the same document, everyone sees what the others said, and there is one version throughout.
What does 'anyone with the link' mean?
That anybody who has the link can open it, including someone it gets forwarded to. For ordinary work it is convenient. For anything containing personal information about people, share with named individuals instead, because a forwarded link is a real way that private data escapes.
Someone changed my work and I cannot get it back
Look for Version history, in the File menu of both Google Docs and Word online. It shows every past version and who changed what, and you can restore any of them. Very little is ever truly lost in a shared document.
Before you move on
- Share a link rather than sending copies
- Give view or comment access unless editing is needed
- Learn where Version history lives
Check what you know
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