Sharing Google Docs

The UNC Charlotte instance of Google Apps is integrated with the University directory enabling all faculty, staff and students to log in with their NinerNET username and password.

Sharing Documents with Everyone

To share Google documents with everyone (i.e. public) or everyone at UNC Charlotte, click on the “Share” button and change who has access.

Sharing Folders

If you have a large group of people you regularly share documents which, it is recommended you create a folder and share that folder.  When you share at the folder level, all docs in that folder will be accessible to everyone with whom the folder is shared by default. That said, you can add and remove people from specific docs within the folder.  Here are the steps:

1. In the Google Docs/Drive home, click on the “Create” button and chose “folder”
2. Move your mouse over the new folder title and click on the downward-facing arrow on the right side.
3. Chose “Share”
4. Add users following the steps for sharing by adding people or from contacts

NOTE: CLAS already has folders set up for various councils and committees.  To share documents with committee members, do the following:

1. Go to the folder for a given committee (e.g. Faculty Council)
2. Click the “Create” button to create a new document in that folder OR
   Click the “upload” button (beside “Create) to upload documents to that folder

For more information on see: Adding Meeting Agendas

Confirming Share Settings

To confirm share settings, do the following:

1. Click on a given document to view it
2. Click the Share button
3. Confirm all people who need access to the document are listed

Sharing by Adding People

You can also share documents with individual users as follows:

1. Create or edit a Google documents, spreadsheet, presentation, form or drawing
2. Click on the “Share” button
3. In the “Add people” field, type in the name or email address of the people you want to share the doc, spreadsheet or form with

Troubleshooting

Sometimes it can be difficult to find a given user because many people have the same last name or a user’s email address is an “aliased” email address (i.e. an email address that does NOT include their NinerNET username, but rather contains their whole name often with capital letters and “.” (e.g. Tom.Smith@uncc.edu might be a possible alias for tsmith23@uncc.edu).  Here’s the best way to ensure you can find the person you want to share with:

1. Type in the person’s last name.  If their full name appears in the drop down list beneath the “Add people” field, then select their row.
2. If step 1 does not work, add a space after their last name and begin typing their first name until their name appears in the drop down list
3. If step 2 does not work (some users may have different first names in their user accounts than the names they commonly use), try adding them using their email address ONLY IF their email address does NOT contain capital letters or “.”
4. If none of the above steps work, then use Outlook to search for them and find their NinerNET user name (referred to as their “Alias)

Most users can be found simply by typing their last name and part of their first name.

Sharing from Contacts

If you share Google Docs with a certain group of people on a regular basis, it makes a lot of sense to put all those people into a group.  To do this instead of typing names into the “Add people” field, do the following:

1. Click on the “Share” button for the doc you want to share
2. Click on the “Choose from contacts” link
3. Search for people using the search field searching first for last name, then space and then first name
4. Click on row of person you want to share with
5. Repeat for additional people

Tip: If the plan to share many docs with the same group of people, then click on the “Save as Group…” button.  Then next time you want to share a doc with this group, click on the drop down menu below the search field and choose the group.