{"id":1714087,"date":"2025-12-04T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/1714087\/how-to-use-google-drive-for-collaboration.html"},"modified":"2025-12-04T06:02:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T11:02:28","slug":"how-to-use-google-drive-for-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/1714087\/how-to-use-google-drive-for-collaboration.html","title":{"rendered":"How to collaborate in Google Drive (and Docs, Sheets, and Slides)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You may think of Google Drive mostly as a cloud storage service, but it’s also the foundation for the company’s online productivity apps including Google Docs<\/a>, Google Sheets<\/a>, and Google Slides<\/a>, where you can collaborate with colleagues on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in real time or asynchronously. Everything you create in these apps — collectively known as the Google Docs Editors — is stored in Google Drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a basic Google account, you get free use of these apps and 15GB of free Google Drive storage. For more storage, Google One plans<\/a> start at $2 per month. For business use, Google sells several tiers of Google Workspace<\/a> plans that include more Drive storage as well as enterprise collaboration, security, and administrative tools. These plans start at $7 per user per month<\/a>. There’s also a free Google Workspace Essentials<\/a> plan for organizations that don’t need hosted email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google Drive and the Docs Editors work more or less the same in the free and paid plans, but with a few extra features added to the Workspace versions. Note that if you have a work or school account, your administrator may have disabled or limited some capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of this article covers sharing and collaborating via My Drive, the drive controlled by individual users whether they use Google Drive through a personal Google account or a Workspace account. A section at the end covers shared drives, which are available only through Google Workspace accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note:<\/strong> Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, is now integrated with Google’s productivity suite for some users, but it’s something you interact with individually, not a tool for collaborating with co-workers, and thus beyond the scope of this article. For info on what you can do with Gemini in Google Drive and the other apps, see our tutorial “Google Workspace: 7 great ways to use the Gemini sidebar<\/a>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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