Sharing turns a document into something other people can open. A share link lets anyone with the URL join your document in real time, with live cursors and edits flowing between everyone. You can protect a link with a password, give it an expiry date, or embed the document in another page. None of this needs the other person to sign in: a share link can be handed to a guest who edits without an account, and you can create links as a guest too.
Opening the Share dialog
Press Share at the top right of the editor. It turns solid blue once the document has a live link, so you can tell at a glance that it is shared. You can also reach it from the command palette (search "Share Document") or from a document's menu in the Explorer.
New to passes? Show Me, at the dialog's top right beside Help, walks you through issuing one: choosing what it lets people do, how long it lasts, creating it, managing your passes and adding a password. Every control stays live while it runs, so you can make a real pass as you go.
The document's owner, and every member of the team whose library holds it, manage its links. Someone who opened your document through a link doesn't see Share; they get a Copy button instead, which makes their own copy (see The Title Bar).
Share links
The dialog draws every link as a pass, a ticket that lets whoever holds it in. The line under the title always tells you who can get in right now: Private while only you can open it, Team while it sits in a team's library, and Shared once any pass is live.
Under Issue a pass, press the role card and pick what the pass lets people do from the three roles it unfolds, then press Create Pass. The link is created and copied in one go, ready to paste. Each pass carries a role, printed on the coloured band across its top:
- An Editor pass lets the visitor change the document with you, live.
- A Participant pass lets them edit text and nothing else. They change the words already on the pages (labels, text boxes, sticky notes, a table's cells, an image's description), write in an article, undo and redo their own changes, comment and send reactions. They cannot add, move, resize, restyle, lock or delete anything, and they cannot change tabs, pages or themes, so they get no palette. It is the pass to hand someone who should correct or fill in the words, such as a reviewer or a co-writer.
- A Viewer pass lets them watch, pan and zoom, follow along and point with the laser, and nothing else: no comments or changes. Hand out a Participant pass to anyone who should chime in.
A document can have several links at once, so you can hand out an edit link to a co-author, a Participant link to your team and a view link to everyone else. Newest passes sit at the top. Whoever opens a link joins the same realtime room, so cursors and changes appear as they happen, and the document lands in their Shared With Me list for next time.
Each pass shows its link with a copy button inside it. Beneath that, one row shows which tabs it Opens (on a document with more than one tab) and how long it is Valid, with its Embed and Live image menus and the bin to revoke it at the right. On a phone the menus drop to a line of their own.
A link opens every tab unless you scope it to one tab. The person you send a one-tab link to sees that tab, and the rest of the document never reaches their browser.
Your name when sharing
As a guest, the Sharing as field at the bottom of the dialog is the name other people see on your cursor and your comments. Type a new one, or press the shuffle button for another random name. It is saved when you create a pass or close the dialog. Signed in, your account name is used and the field is hidden. See Guest Identity.
Controlling access
Two self-serve controls let you bound who gets in and for how long:
- A share password makes every link prompt for a password before it opens. The document's owner, and the members of its team, never need it.
- A share link expiry gives a link a lifetime (a week, a month, or six months). When it runs out the link stops working, but stays in your dialog so you can extend or delete it.
These are independent: you can use either, both, or neither. They are layered on top of the link role, not a replacement for it. Share Link Security explains what a link does and does not protect.
Embedding a document
An embed puts a live copy of a document inside another page, like a wiki, a doc, or Notion. The embed honours the link's role: an Editor pass embeds an editable canvas, while a Participant or Viewer pass embeds a read-only one with pan and zoom. Either way it hides the editor chrome and updates as the document is edited. Each pass's Embed menu offers Copy embed URL for the bare URL and Copy iframe for a ready-made snippet to paste.
Where an <iframe> isn't allowed, like a GitHub README, use a live image from the pass's Live image menu instead.
Stopping sharing
To stop a link working, press the bin (Revoke link) on its pass and confirm with Revoke. Anyone viewing through it is sent out of the document straight away, and the URL stops resolving. A revoked link can't be brought back: create a new pass if you change your mind, which gives a new URL.
A document in This Browser lives only in your browser, so there is nothing on the server to share yet. Opening Share on one shows a gate instead of the link controls, with a Sync Document button that uploads it to your account first.
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