Here’s another quick tip for sharing documents from Google. This trick works with any Google item (Docs, Sheets, etc) and is similar to the fast-copy trick.
View Only Sharing
When you share a doc as view only, the viewer still sees the entire editor. This takes up screen space, takes longer to load, and it can confuse people who don’t use Google docs often because they can’t edit anything. They can still request edit access, which is nice in case you meant to give them edit access but forgot.
Share Without the Editor
You can make a quick change to the link you send which shares the doc but without the editor.
Click on Share and then make sure the link is set to View Only.
Paste the link into your email, Canvas, Seesaw, etc, and change /edit to /preview to the end of the link:
When the document loads, the user will have a nice, clean version to look at. Access rules still apply, so you can limit you viewers to signed in ECS users or even down to specific individuals. This also works with all types of Google files, even Slides!
