How to See Who Has Viewed a Google Doc

Google’s text editor tool Google Docs has changed how we work with our colleagues, making and suggesting edits to a text document in real-time.

Google Docs offers great efficiency and flexibility with collaboration. Everyone who is given access to a document can see the changes and comments done to it, and access version history to see the latest changes highlighted at their convenience.

When you share a Google Docs, you can choose the level of access people have - if they can edit a document, only view it or leave comments on it without being able to edit the text.

However, until just recently, you could only see who edited your Google Docs, but not just who read it. If a person didn’t make any edit, leave a comment or save the document, you had no idea if that person opened and read the latest version of a document.

And often we want to share a document with people with the intention that they only read the document without allowing them to make changes to it.

Google recently launched a new feature to Google Docs that allows people to check who read a document. You just need to configure this feature in your Google Docs and you’ll be able to see who viewed your document.

In this post, we’ll explain how you can see who accessed and read your Google Docs file.

G Suite Activity Monitor

Usually, G-Suite is used by organizations that require collaboration in the workplace. If you use G Suite to collaborate with your coworkers, you can use the activity monitor to track who viewed a Google Doc file.

Note that to get access to the information about who viewed your Google Docs, you need to have G-Suite, which is a paid version.

When you have your G-Suite, follow the steps below to see who viewed your doc:

1. Open the Google Doc that you wish to see who opened it.
2. Click on the upward arrow icon in the upper right.

3. Alternatively, you can go to the Tools pull-down menu in the upper part of the screen, and click on “Activity Dashboard”.
4. In the Activity Dashboard, under the Viewers section, you will see two options - Shared With and All Viewers.
5. Click on the Shared with tab to see all people who have access to the document and when they last viewed it.

6. Go to All Viewers to see all the people who have viewed your document along with time. You can also filter the view list by time.
7. You can also go to the “Sharing history” tab to see who you’ve shared the Google Docs with and edit their access.

Viewers and comments trends

Apart from seeing who viewed your Google Doc and when they viewed it, you can also see trends on when people viewed or commented on your document with the Activity Monitor.

1. Go to the Viewers Trend tab to see a bar chart of the number of unique viewers over any span of time you choose from 7 days to all time.
2. Go to the Comments Trend tab to see bar charts of the comment trend over any span of time from 7 days to all time.

How to turn off View History in Google Docs

In case you want to turn off view history in Google Docs, you can do it with these easy steps:

1. Open the Google Doc.
2. Click on the upward trending arrow in the upper right corner of the doc or go to “Tools” in the menubar.
3. Go to Activity Dashboard and select “Privacy Settings”.
4. In the Document sharing section, toggle off the “Show my view history for this document” option.

Turn off only your view history in Google Docs with a free personal Google account

Apart from turning off view history in Google Docs with the paid G-Suite version, you can turn off your view history in the personal or free version of Google Docs.

To do this:

1. Go to the start page on docs.google.com.
2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top-left corner of the screen.
3. Go to Settings.

4. Under Activity dashboard, toggle off “Show your view history”.

If you want to learn another helpful feature in Google Docs, check out how to use the real-time chat feature in Google Docs that allows users to chat within the document.

Also, if you’re using Google Photos regularly, we’re sure you wondered at some point if you can create a safe space for your photos. Learn how you can lock your Google Photos Gallery.