Handy Google Tip: Force a Copy

Have you ever wanted to share a Google Doc with a colleague or a student, but you wanted them to be able to edit the document for themselves? Sharing it with viewing or commenting privileges isn't an option then. Giving them editing privileges lets them alter your original file. You can ask them to make a copy for themselves, but sometimes they forget to do that or they don't know how.

Problem solved: force them to make a copy!

It is really quite simple:

Open the document you want to share with the other person and copy and paste the link to the document into an email message.

Now here's the important part: delete out the "edit" at the end of the URL up to the final slash and replace what you deleted with the word "copy".

Send the email.

When the other person clicks on the link to open the file, they will be prompted to make a copy. That is the only way they can actually get the file then. Like this:

Here's a quick video that demonstrates how to do this: