Whether you are embarking on writing support documentation, creating a survey, proposing an agenda, drafting a newsletter, scripting a presentation or finalising data for a report, collaboration enables transparency with your co-workers. Best practice at the University of York is to create your document in a shared space at the outset, either a folder that is shared with your team or a Shared drive. In this way the file will inherit the sharing permissions of the shared space it is created in.
Whether you have created a Google Doc in a shared space or not, you can allow others to collaborate with you by granting View, Edit or Comment permission to your document. This can be done by either sharing with a single email address, a Group or by Link Sharing. We recommend using Link Sharing only when it is not possible to share with individuals or groups. For Drive folders and documents you own you can turn off sharing at any time.
At every stage of working on your document you can invite people to comment who don't already have comment permissions by adding a + sign to their email address within the comment.
For instructions on how to do this see Add comments and Replies
If the sharing is by virtue of the file being in a My Drive shared folder, you can still change access levels in individual files for those who have already have folder access. To Share files from a Shared drive you will need at least Contributor access and cannot take away access to your document for members of a Shared drive, only extend it.
Google Docs enables those with Edit and Comment Permissions to also Suggest edits. If you are in editing mode then you will see a pencil image in the top right hand corner of the screen. You can switch to Suggesting mode here in the pull down menu. When you Suggest edits, content is not deleted but instead struck through and suggested changes appear in a comment box to the right of the text. Anyone with Edit access can choose to accept or reject these changes.
You can collaborate with co-workers in these Google applications. The rules for View, Comment and Edit access apply to Google Sheets and Google Slides however you cannot Suggest edits in these applications. The Google Workspace learning centre has additional information on how to Share and collaborate with Google Slides and how to Share and collaborate with Google Sheets.
Google Forms is the exception here in that when you add collaborators to a form there is only one permission level and that is Edit, when you invite people to be a collaborator on a form they will be able to edit any part of your form, including responses and where they are saved.