Mar 18, 2020

Access Denied: How to Find Owner of Google Doc

My company has a Google doc that we use daily that all of a sudden is saying "Access Denied." We don't know who the owner of the document is, as we've been using it for years and the original owner could be long gone. How to we determine who the owner is if we're denied access? Is there a workaround to change the owner?

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Docs,Microsoft Windows,Business

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User 13486201707612832682

Mar 18, 2020

The owner found time to create a document that serves the team well, and it is easy to use. Imagine how frustrating it is to be prepared to save daily statistics and not have the access we have been told to apply.

Jo S.

Diamond Product Expert

I've been volunteering in the help forums since 2013. I do NOT work for Google.

Mar 18, 2020

Hi, Andi,

The help communities are managed by volunteer product users (even the product experts are volunteers), not Google employees. We don't have access to users' data and can't restore access to files. Be aware that denied access sometimes occurs with files that have become corrupted. This often happens with documents that have had many changes over a long period of time, as yours has.

If you are able to make a copy of the closed file in Google Drive, please do so. The copy will wipe out the version history and hopefully any other issues that might have corrupted it. If you aren't able to make a copy, try to download the closed document in Drive to .docx format -- you should be able to convert it back to Docs format after it's been downloaded.

If you are unable to do either of these, I'd suggest reaching out to Google Support, which should be available to the G Suite administrator at your company if you have a G Suite account.

~Jo

Google Product Expert Volunteer (not a Google employee)