From the course: Working and Collaborating Online

Collaborate on Word documents

From the course: Working and Collaborating Online

Collaborate on Word documents

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- With the way a lot of work gets done today, it's important to know how to collaborate with others using digital tools online. With Microsoft Word, you can share your document with others so they can view, comment on, or coauthor the contents with you. This allows everyone to work on the same document instead of multiple copies of the document, so you never have to worry about changes or edits appearing in some copies, but not in others. When you share a Word document for collaboration, everyone can work on and see changes at the same time. To share a document, open it in Word, and then click the Share button. From here, you'll save it to your OneDrive account. This places the document in the cloud so it can be easily accessed by everyone who needs to work on it. Next you'll determine the permissions for the file. Notice, by default it says anyone with the link can edit this file. If you need to share a document with people, but you only want them to be able to read it, you can click here and uncheck Allow Editing. Additionally, you can set an expiration date so the document won't be able to be accessed after the specified date, and you can also password protect the document so only people you share the password with will be able to open the document. I'm going to click Cancel for now, because I do want to allow editing, and I don't need to set an expiration date or password. Next you'll enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the document with. I'm going to share this with my colleague, Jade. Her name and email appears here, so I'll select it. And you can share it with as many people as you like. And you can add a message to explain why you're sharing the document. Then click Send. Microsoft will send an email that includes a link to the document to your recipients. Let's see what this looks like from the perspective of someone receiving the email. I'm actually logged into Jade's email here, and here's the email from Microsoft, and here she can click Open to open the document in Word Online. To edit the document, she clicks Edit Document, and she'll have the choice of editing it here in Word Online, or she can use the desktop version of Word if it's installed on her computer. Let's choose to edit it in Word Online. The great thing about collaborating this way is that everyone can see the changes everyone else is making in real time. So if Jade adds some text to this document, and I switch back to my copy of the document here in Word on my computer, I can see that change. And I can see exactly where Jade is working on the document, which is indicated by this colored cursor here. If I roll my mouse over it, I can see her name. This is especially useful if there are multiple people working on the same document. You can see where everybody is working in that particular document at once. Also, everyone's changes are automatically saved, so everyone else is always working on the most up-to-date version of the document. And that's how to share and collaborate on a document in Word.

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