The information and instructions provided below refer to working from the online version of OneDrive for Office 365.

Share documents or folders in Office 365

The documents and folders you store in OneDrive for Business are private until you decide to share them. Similarly, in a team site library, you may want to share specific documents or folders with people who don't otherwise have access to the site. When you share documents and folders, you can decide whether to let people edit or just view them.

Note

You may also be able share documents with external users (people not on your network) by inviting them as "Guests," or by creating and posting guest links. For details, see Share sites or documents with people outside your organization.

Table of Contents

You can share a link to a document that others can also share by using Get a link. Get a link is available only for individual files, but it's the easiest way to share documents with everyone in your organization or to share with people externally (as long as external sharing is enabled for your sites).

  1. Go to OneDrive for Business or the site library that has the document you want to share.
  2. Right-click the document you want to share, and then select Get a link.

3. Click on "Get a link"

Note

Once you click on "Get a link" the file is set to "Shared" status. For more information on changing permissions refer to the "Stop sharing a document or folder" section below.

4. Click on "Copy" to copy the text to the clipboard.  You can then paste it in to an email or other message to share the document.


Share a document or folder by inviting people

To share folders or to share documents when "Get a link" isn't available, you can invite people.

  1. Go to OneDrive for Business or the site library that has the document or folder you want to share.
  2. Right-click the file you want to share, and then select Share.

  1. In the Share dialog box on the Invite people tab, type names or email addresses of people you want to share the document or folder with.

  1. Select a permission setting, such as Can edit.

  1. If you want, type a message to be included with an email that's sent to all invitees. The email includes a link to the shared document.
  2. If you don't want to send an email, uncheck Send an email invitation.
  3. Click Share.


More information in this article

The links below are to Microsoft support documents. For security purposes ITS has decided to restrict certain functionality that may mentioned in the links below. For more information contact Information Technology Services help desk.


Learn more about file storage and sharing in Office 365

For recommendations on where to store files in Office 365 and how to set things up, see Set up Office 365 file storage and sharing.

Share documents with a limited set of people

To share multiple documents with a selection of people, you have a couple of options:

  • Create a group (if you're in Office 365 and Groups are enabled)
  • Create a folder and place documents in that folder as you create them

Create a group (if you're in Office 365 and Groups are enabled)

  1. In the navigation, next to Groups, click the plus sign (+).

  1. Type a name for the group, set the Privacy to Public or Private.

  1. Click Create.
  2. Add members to the group.
  3. In your group, near the top of the page, click Files to go to the group OneDrive.

  1. Drag files onto the page or click Upload.

Create a folder and place documents in that folder as you create them

  1. To create a folder, click New > Folder. You can share the folder with people as you create it.
  2. If you didn't already share the folder while creating it, share the folder by inviting people.
  3. Upload or drag files to the folder.


See who you're sharing a document or folder with

  1. Right-click the document and then click Share.
  2. In the Share dialog box, click Shared with.

  1. If you're sharing with more people than whose names will fit on the card, select the more link at the end of the list of names. You can scroll the list to see all names.

Tips   If the library you're working in has a Sharing column, you can select the people icon to open the Share dialog box.

Stop sharing a document or folder

To make a document or folder private again, you can stop sharing it.

  1. Select the people icon for the document or folder to open the Share dialog box.

  1. On the Shared with tab in the Share dialog box, select Can View or Can Edit next to the person you want to stop sharing with, and then select Stop Sharing.

  1. To stop sharing a document with everyone at once, select STOP SHARING below the list of people you're sharing with.

Note

 The STOP SHARING link that removes all users at once is not available for folders. To quickly stop sharing a folder with many users or groups, try this: Click ADVANCED, use the check boxes to select the users or groups you want to remove, and then click Remove User Permissions.



Other ways to share a document or folder with everyone in your organization

In OneDrive for Business, there are more ways to share a document with everyone:

  • Create a "Shared with Everyone" folder (or one with a similar name) and place documents in that folder as you create them. To create a folder, click New > Folder. You can share the folder with people as you create it.

Note

Note   You may already have a Shared with Everyone folder that was provisioned for you.
The Share dialog box lets you select "Everyone except external users." If your organization allows external sharing, sharing with "Everyone" includes external users: people outside of your organization who have previously been invited to share documents as guests, either by you or by others in your organization.
If you have a Shared with Everyone folder that was provisioned for you, everyone gets permission to edit documents that you put in the Shared with Everyone folder, unless you change the permission setting or unless your OneDrive for Business was created before June 2014. If your OneDrive for Business was created before that date, the Shared with Everyone folder started with View-only permissions. You can change the permission setting any time by following the instructions for sharing a folder earlier in this article.



How do people find documents I've shared with everyone?

Documents you share with everyone don't appear in their Shared with Me view in OneDrive for Business. Why not? Consider that depending on the size of your organization, there might be hundreds if not thousands of documents that are shared with everyone. Also, you may not want to send a share invitation email to everyone in your organization.
Instead, people can find these documents by:

You can find any document's web URL in its document callout.

Copy and paste the URL into an email addressed to specific people you want to notify.

In this example, Molly Dempsey searches on the keyword "Court Cases" to find any relevant documents shared with her in her organization.