How to transfer ownership of your Google Doc

The person who creates or uploads a Google Docs document is also the owner of that document. However, there might be situations when you want to transfer the ownership of the document to someone else. For example, you can create a copy of a document and make someone else its owner.

When you transfer ownership, you will still be able to access the document and view it.

However, you will not be able to make any edits to it (unless you’re given editing rights, as opposed to only viewing rights) or delete the document.

You also will not be able to make someone else the owner of the document. 

Moreover, the new owner can remove you from the list of people with whom the document is shared. If this happens, you will not be able to access the document anymore. Make sure that you are aware of what you would be losing out on if you transfer ownership of your document.

Note that Google Docs (and Google Sheets and Google Slides) doesn’t allow you to share ownership of a document: at any given time, there can only be a single owner. This is why you can only transfer ownership and not share it. Also, you cannot do it from your Android device, iPhone or iPad- you can only do it from a web browser.

With that introduction, let’s look at the steps to transfer the ownership of a document.

2 ways to transfer Ownership of a Google Document

  • How to transfer OwnerShip of Single File
  • How to transfer ownership of a folder.

How to transfer ownership of a single file

In this section, we will be talking about how to transfer ownership of a single file, rather than a group of files or a folder.

Step 1: Open the document whose ownership you’d like to change.

You can find all your Google Docs documents on the homepage under ‘Recent documents.’ 

You will also see a button that says ‘Owned by anyone.’ Click on it and change it to ‘Owned by me.’ This is because you can only change the ownership of a document that you own.

Step 2: Click on the Share button.

Click on the blue Share button located at the top right corner of your screen. A window will pop up where you can add people or groups with whom you’d like to share the document. You will also be able to see the people you’ve already shared the document with.

If you’d like to transfer ownership to a person that you’re already sharing the document with, click on the button next to their name and select ‘Make owner.’

If you haven’t already shared the document with the person you’d like to transfer ownership to, make sure to do that first. You can share it by entering their email in the box. Once you’ve shared it, follow the above step and make them the owner. Click on ‘Done’ once this is over.


How to transfer the ownership of a folder 

You can follow the same process for transferring the ownership of a folder. First, open the folder that you would like to transfer the ownership for. Then, click on the share icon to view people you’ve shared it with/add new people. 

Click on the button next to their name and select ‘Make owner.’ Confirm that you want to change ownership and click on ‘Done.’


Conclusion 

That is all for this article! As we’ve seen, it is very easy to change the ownership of a Google Docs document.

To recap, we’ve covered what it means to transfer the ownership of a document, and how you can do so for a file and a folder. We hope you found this article useful.

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