How to Share Without Letting Others Edit your Google Sheets
Learn how to share your Google Sheets without allowing others to edit by using viewer or commenter permissions, and discover how to create a view-only copy of your sheet using the import range function.
If you're trying to share your sheet without letting others edit, you just want them to view the sheet. I'm gonna show you two ways to do this. First is go up to the share button in the top right click share , and here you can change restricted to anyone with the link , or you can add people by their email address or a group . And there are two options for viewer or commentator or commenter . You can select either one of these and they cannot edit your sheet. Commenter will allow them to add comments but not edit any individual things. So I, here we'll select viewer, click done, and we've updated the status. And you can see up in the top right that it says public on the web. Anyone on the internet with the link can open it and see it.
However, if you're actually editing the sheet, working in the sheet, maybe you have multiple tabs that you're editing on. But you don't want others to see those edits. You just want them to see one particular sheet and that's it. I'm gonna show you one other way to do this. We can restrict this. Just go back to restricted , click done. And I'm gonna make a copy of this sheet, so that'll be called copy of or maybe view only . And now in this sheet, I'm gonna actually go and delete all of this data . And instead I'm gonna write up here equals import range . And we need two things. We need the spreadsheet , URL and the range string . The URL is right up here, so I'll put that in quotes. And the range string in quotes is going to be whatever the name of this sheet is.
Sheet one, and I'm gonna put in A to D because that's all I want to see. Be seen. Sheet one, exclamation. A D. Now it's gonna ask me to allow access , click, allow access only. I can do that in this sheet as the editor and owner of both sheets. Now, this sheet I'm going to share . Anyone with the link can view it, click done. Now I can edit other tabs in this sheet and I can come back to here and say, oh, I need to edit this to 23. And here on the shared sheet that people can see, you can see it updated in real time. Took a little bit of time, maybe a few moments or a few seconds to update as this formula does need to regenerate or re get the information.
But it should be updated in relatively real time. And there you can share without letting others edit. You are watching better sheets here on YouTube. Make sure you check out this video or this video and subscribe right now to get more tips, tricks, how tos, get more out of your Google sheets than you ever have before. I'm excited to be making a ton more videos here. Ask me questions down in the comments and I will answer them in future videos. But for right now, right here, one of these videos is gonna be your next Google sheet.