Sharing and permission levels

Who can I share with?

In the sharing dialog, you can share with any of three types of targets:

Individuals: you can share with individual users by adding their email address.
Groups: you can share with Google groups to give access to multiple users at a time. New users added to a group will have access to the table and workspace, and users removed from the group will no longer have access to the table or workspace.
Your domain: if you are part of a Google Workspace domain, formerly known as G Suite, you can set a domain-level permission setting to allow anyone who is part of your company to be able to access the table or workspace if they have the link to it. This is similar to Google Docs’ “Share via link.”

Permission levels & roles

You can give sharing targets a specific level of permission, based on these defined roles:

Viewer: the user will only be able to view the workspace or table, but not edit anything.
Commenter: the user can view and also comment on table rows, and view bots.
Writer: the user can view, comment, and only add/edit/delete table rows, but not change the table structure (columns, views, forms, bots, etc.).
Editor: the user can edit the workspace or table.
None: this will remove the target from the permissions list.
Owner: this is a special role that is given to the creator of a workspace or table. Owners can permanently delete a workspace or table, but otherwise have the same permissions as an Editor. Views are owned by the table and any editor of the table can delete them.

Sharing tables vs workspaces

Note: workspaces and tables have separate permissions and don’t affect each other.

When sharing a workspace with others, there is a checkbox that makes it easier to add the new collaborator to all the tables within that workspace, if you have the access to do so (e.g. at least editor access to those underlying tables). However, if you uncheck that option, you will only share the workspace with the user without sharing any of the tables within.

The purpose of this is to allow you to have more fine-grained control over who should have access to what. You can adjust the individual sharing settings for each table within a workspace, and if a user doesn't have access to a table within a workspace, they will not be able to see the table's contents.

Users get the deepest level of permission that applies to them, meaning: if a user is given multiple permission levels (perhaps through different google groups, the user is given both edit and comment access), the product will always behave as if the user has the deepest level of permission (edit access in this case). This is consistent with how Drive works.

Workspace sharing dialog	Individual table sharing dialog

Role	For Workspaces	For Tables
Viewer	Can find the workspace and see it on the homepage. Can open the workspace to see the tables within it. Any tables the user doesn’t have view permission to see are hidden from view.	Can find tables and see them on the homepage. Can open the table and see rows, switch between views, and *temporarily* adjust grouping, filtering, sorting (doesn’t impact others). Can’t see comments, forms or bots.
Commenter	Can do everything a viewer can do. You can’t currently comment on a workspace.	Can do everything a viewer can; and see comments and comment on table rows, and view which bots are configured on the table.
Writer	Can do everything a commenter can do. At this time, no real difference with commenters.	Can do everything a commenter can; and also add/edit/delete table rows. Can’t edit table columns, views, forms, bots, or cells in locked columns.
Editor	Can do everything a commenter can do; and edit workspace name, description, share workspace, add tables, or rearrange tables.	Can do everything a commenter can; and edit table name, description, share the table, add or edit rows, columns, views, forms, and bots.
Owner	Can do everything an editor can do; and permanently delete a workspace.	Can do everything an editor can; and permanently delete a table.