How to Chat on a Google Doc?

January 11, 2022

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In this tutorial, we will show you how to chat on a Google Doc. We recommend you study this manual carefully and start practicing.

Checklist of crucial points we aim to highlight here:

Adding People to the Doc
Starting Chat
Other Features
Leave Comments for Others

It’s nice to have a quick chat inside a working space, a kind of simple messenger to tell your colleagues something fast without getting distracted from the work when it all happens in one place. Google Docs has that feature for you, but it’s available only for signed-in to Google users and only when they are added to the document via their personal Google emails. Let’s add people to work and chat with to our doc.

Watch the video from https://thegoodocs.com/ and find out how to chat on a Google Doc:

Adding People to the Doc

First, we add people we want to chat with in the doc. On the document, we go to the “Share” button in the top right corner and press it

Here’s the sharing menu, and in this field, we enter emails of the people who we want to add, of course, with gmail.com at the end. We are entering a sample email and clicking “Enter”. It will look like this, meaning it recognized that the person has a Google account

Then you may want to add a few more people, which is performed the same way

After that, you can send an invitation message if you like

After all, you click “Share” here. And the changes are saved, the people were added

Starting Chat

Once there are two or more people in the doc, you can start chatting.

Go to the top right corner of the doc and locate people's icons that will look either like icons with the picture, the person`s photo, with blank icons, or icons with animals, for example. Next to people's icons, there’s this round button, “Show chat”, press it

And that will open the chat window on the right, where you can finally speak to other members of the document by entering something here in this field

NB! But all this is possible only when at least two are online at the same time and are on the same document.

NB! And since the chat history here is not saved, you need to make sure that a specific person you want to chat with is present on the doc at the moment.

NB! Also keep in mind that this is a group chat, so everyone online will see it and will be able to reply as well, so there’s no individual direct messaging.

Other Features

This is how it will look to the other person. There will be this notification, coming from that chat button

And when you press it, the chat window opens up, and you can reply to the message

You can then close it

NB! And when someone writes there one more time, you will get the notification as well.

NB! So it’s super-fast, it doesn’t distract you from work, with no need to go in any other space to talk, but yet can be used for only one time quick chat and certainly not for some important discussions.

Leave Comments for Others

And one more thing, since the chat history is not saved, there is a way to leave messages on the doc for other people to view later via comments and suggestions.

Basically, to leave a comment on something, you need to highlight that part of the text, image, or any other element on the doc like this. Then right mouse click on the highlighted data. And in the menu, locate and press “Comment”

That will highlight with yellow the area you are commenting about and will create such a little window where you just simply enter what you got to tell to the others. And press “Comment”

Now that will highlight that part you’ve commented on for everyone on the doc

And the window with your comment will remain here and will be visible to everyone as well until you clear it by pressing on the mark on that comment

We hope this tutorial on how to chat on a Google Doc will be helpful for you. Good luck!

Written by

Team TheGoodocs

We are a team of creative people who dream of sharing knowledge and making your work and study easier. Our team of professional designers prepares unique free templates. We create handy template descriptions for you to help you choose the most suitable one. On our blog, you'll find step-by-step tutorials on how to use Google Products. And our YouTube channel will show you all the ins and outs of Google products with examples.