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Sharing your Coda docs

Best practices for sharing your Coda docs.

⏰ Read time: 12 minutes Whether it’s your first time or you need a quick refresher, we built this guide on sharing Coda docs to help you determine the right access for you and your team.

What's in this guide

What you’ll learn
  • Sharing docs with a team
  • Sharing docs across a company
  • Using folders to share docs
  • Additional odds and ends of sharing

1. Ways of sharing

 Coda is designed with collaboration in mind, offering multiple ways to share your doc. When you’re ready to invite others, you can decide what type of access they’ll have from the following options:
  • Can view for read-only access.
  • Can comment for adding feedback using comments.
  • Can edit if you'll need them to make changes to the doc.
We recommend regularly reviewing your doc & folder access settings so you keep your preferred security and collaboration needs.

Use the matrix below to determine the best sharing situation for your scenario, then scroll down to learn how to share your doc.

Invite to your doc directly

 Best when you want to share an individual doc with a subset of specific people. 1. Click the Share icon in the upper right corner of your doc. 2. Type the name or email address of the person you'd like to share with. Their team doesn’t need to have a Coda license for you to be able to share with them. 3. When you invite someone, you can decide what type of access they'll have:
  • Can view for read-only access.
  • Can comment for adding feedback using comments.
  • Can edit if you'll need them to make changes to the doc.
4. You can also use the Notify people toggle to decide whether you’d like to send them a notification or not.

Share with all members of your workspace

 Best when you want to make your doc widely accessible to all team members that belong to your workspace in Coda. 1. Click the Share icon in the upper right corner of your doc. 2. Find the option that says Anyone in [workspace name] workspace. 3. If you see Anyone with a [your email domain] email address instead, click, then choose the workspace option from the dropdown. 4. Just as with the other sharing options, choose what level of access to grant these folks: Can view, Can comment, or Can edit.

Share with all users that share your email domain

 Best when you want to make your doc widely accessible to all users that share your email domain, even if they’re not in your workspace. 1. Click the Share icon in the upper right corner in your doc 2. Find the option that says Anyone with a [your email domain] email address. 3. If you see Anyone in [workspace name] workspace instead, click on then choose the email address option from the dropdown. 4. Just as with the other sharing options, choose what level of access to grant these folks: Can view, Can comment, or Can edit.

FAQs on email domain sharing

  • How can I share my doc with a different email domain instead?
    • You must be the doc owner to share a doc with your domain. To update a doc's domain sharing to a different domain, follow these steps:
      • You will first have to transfer doc ownership to another Coda user whose account matches the domain that you'd like to share with.
      • Then you (or the new doc owner) will have to update sharing access to your old domain to No access.
      • Finally, the person you transferred ownership to will have to open the share panel and update the domain sharing to share to the new domain. Note that this will only work once you've set the original domain share to No access and have closed and reopened the share panel.
  • Can I share my doc with multiple domains?
    • At this time, domain sharing doesn’t support sharing with multiple domains at once. If you want to switch which domain you share with, check out the previous section.
    • A suitable alternative may be sharing via workspace sharing instead (also shown above). This will allow you to share a doc with everyone in your workspace, even if that includes multiple domains.

2. Share at scale using folders

What is a folder?

 Folders help you organize docs and are usually created for easily sharing a collection of docs to a department, team, or for a large cross-functional project. Anyone with access to a folder will also have access to all docs in the folder. You can also control the level of access - view, comment, or edit - that collaborators have to the docs inside each folder. For example: Let’s say you have a folder with all the employee handbooks that’s shared with the whole workspace. You may want to give ‘Can edit’ access only to members of the HR team, and give everyone in the workspace ‘Can view’ access. If you have a number of docs that you regularly want to share with the same members of your workspace, consider moving those docs to a folder to more easily share at scale.

Create a folder

 To create a new folder in your workspace, follow these steps: 1. From your workspace home (coda.io/docs), click on your workspace name in the left panel 2. Next to the Folders section, click view all. 3. In the upper right corner, click the +New folder button. 4. Give the folder a name and (optionally) choose an icon, add a description, then press Create.

Share folders

 You can adjust the permissions of a folder to choose who has access to the docs inside. When you create a folder, it is private by default. This means no one else in your workspace has access to any of the docs within that folder. But you also have the option to modify these permissions and share the folder as you see fit. To share a folder, you must already have edit access to that folder. Once you do, you can simply follow these steps: 1. Find and click into the folder you wish to share. 2. Towards the top of the page, near the folder title, click Share. 3. If you wish to share the folder with your entire workspace, you can do this via the Anyone in the workspace option. Just click on the drop-down next to this option, and choose the appropriate level of access (edit, comment, or view). 4. If you instead wish to share with specific individuals, use the text bar at the top to search for and add these users. Then use the drop-down to the right to choose which level of access they should have (edit, comment, or view). Finally click send to notify these users.

FAQs on folder sharing

  • Can I share a folder with anyone with a [your email address] email domain?
    • No, folders can be shared only with members of your workspace, either individually or for all members.
  • What if a user is given one type of permission on the folder level, and a different type of permission for a doc within that folder?
    • In this case, they are given the most permissive access level between the two.
    • For example, if Anna is granted “can edit” access on a folder and “can view” access on a doc that is within the folder, she will have “can edit” access on the doc, as it is the most permissive access level. If Anna is granted “can view” access on a folder and “can edit” access on a doc, she will also have “can edit” access on the doc, as it is the most permissive.
  • If I invite someone to a folder, will they be able to invite others to the folder?
    • If you grant this person edit access (”can edit") to the folder, then they will be able to invite others to the folder. If you only grant them comment or view access, then they won’t have access to the folder settings and cannot invite others to the folder.
  • How do I remove someone from a folder?
    • If you wish to remove someone’s access to a given folder, you can do so by clicking into the folder, then clicking the Share button at the top of the folder’s page. This will open the share dialog for the folder. You should see everyone with access to the folder listed here. Find the person you wish to remove, click into the drop-down to the right of their name, and select Remove from the options.

3. Other things to know about sharing

Default sharing settings

 You may be wondering, "when I create a new doc, what folder is it added to?" Default settings depend on where (in which folder) a doc is created. If you create a doc within your My Docs folder, then the doc will automatically be private and only accessible by you. If you create the doc in any other folder, the sharing settings for the doc will be determined by the sharing settings of the folder. In other words, the doc will be accessible by anyone who also has access to the folder in which the doc lives.

Advanced doc sharing settings

 When you open up the Share settings for your doc, you’ll see a slider icon in the upper right of the pop-up. Click this to open the advanced sharing settings. Here, you’ll find the following key options to give you even more control over sharing your doc:
  • Allow anyone who can edit to change permissions and share. This setting allows anyone with edit access to your doc to also have control over sharing that doc. If you’d like to prevent others from modifying access to your doc, toggle this setting off.
  • Allow anyone to copy this doc. This setting controls whether people with access to your doc can make their own copy. With this setting off, editors, viewers, and commenters will no longer have the option to copy the doc, including from the top left-hand corner of the doc or via a Copy Doc button. This setting is toggled on be default, and you must be the doc owner to change it.
  • Share with Coda support. Use this only if you're in conversation with a Coda Support team member and have discussed sharing your doc.

Publishing your docs

 Publishing is another way of sharing docs that focuses on beautifying your doc for a wider audience. It creates a ‘cleaner’ URL (like coda.io/@profilename/docname) that directs people to a version more fit for public consumption. There are lots of publishing-specific settings, including the ability to publish to a custom domain (kristenswebsite.com/blog vs. coda.io/@kristen/myblog) and the ability for your published doc to be searchable in Google. You can choose for the doc to be displayed in view/play/edit mode. This applies to anyone who visits the published link. Note that the sharing access is stacked on top of the view/play/edit mode so that the most restrictive display setting “wins”. If someone has edit access to a doc whose published version is set to “view,” they will not be able to edit the published version. To learn more on how to publish, use this help article.

Now what?

 Check out some additional resources for building docs that are easy to navigate—so your team doesn’t just receive them, but actually uses them.

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