Collaborating With Shared iCloud Drive Folders

A new feature of macOS 10.15.4 and the latest versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote is the ability to collaborate using shared iCloud Drive folders. Once you share a folder, you can create documents in those folders and they are instantly ready for real-time collaboration with no additional steps. This can be used to work on a whole set of files with your team over the course of a project, or permanently.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to collaborate using a Shared iCloud Drive folder.
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So Apple came out with a new version of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for Mac on April 1. Just before that they came out with macOS Catalina version 10.15.4. That new version of macOS allowed us to have shared iCloud Drive folders. So you can share an entire folder with somebody else and they could see all of the files in there. Well if you use that in conjunction with the new Pages, Numbers, and Keynote you can instantly collaborate on documents using those apps. Before you had to turn Collaboration on for a specific file. But now you can collaborate using any Pages, Numbers, and Keynote file that goes into those shared folders with whomever they are shared with. So it's kind of instant collaboration. You can have a whole folder filled with files and go back and forth on various different documents without having to share each one individually.
So the first thing we need to do is create a Shared Folder. On the top here I've got a Desktop Mac logged into the first demo account. On the bottom I have a laptop Mac and that is logged into a second demo account. So on the first demo account I'm going to go and create a Shared Folder here. Now I'm inside a folder called Project. That's in my Documents folder which is part of iCloud Drive. You have to create this folder in iCloud Drive in order to share it. I'm going to just go and create a new folder and I'm going to call this folder Project X and I'm going to make it a shared folder. 
With that selected I can click on the Share button here. I can select Add People and then you're going to see the Share Options here. I'm going to make sure I have it set to Only People I Invite. Anybody can make changes that I invite. I select the method for sending the link. So basically I can copy the link and send it anyway I want. But I'm going to use Messages to send it really quickly and easily. I'll hit Share. Now I can specify who to send the message to. So I'll send it to this demo account. I can customize the message if I want or just send the default.
Now on the second demo account you're going to see a little notification comes up there. Click on that and I'll get a link here. I can click on that link and it's going to ask if I want to open this folder. Yes, I do. I'll hit Open. It's going to open it up in a new finder window. You could see it there. Let's close that Finder window and I can also see that it shows up right at the top level of iCloud Drive. There's Project X.
The reason we're doing this is to collaborate with a variety of files. Previously you could be working on one file, say in Pages, and then decide to collaborate with somebody using that one file. If you wanted to do it for several files you would have to do each one individually. But now with Shared iCloud Folders you don't have to do that. I shared the Project X folder with someone else and any Pages, Numbers, or Keynote documents that I've put in there were instantly shared collaborative documents with that person.
Let's create one. I'm going to go to Pages and create a new document. I'm going to Save that in that special folder. Go to iCloud Drive, then Documents, and then Projects. There's that Project X folder. So I'm going to Save it there and I'm going to call it First. Now that document is saved. Now if I look in the other computer I'll see it appear there in that folder. I can also look here on the original computer and I can see here that I've got a file there named Project X. We both see the same things in that Project X folder. 
I'm going to double click on that now here on that second demo account and it's going to open it in Pages. So now we both have that same document opened up in Pages and we can work on it at the same time. So the second account can type another line. Now notice in the second account it says here Collaborate and it's green. If you click on it you could see it's shared by somebody inside of a shared folder. Now on the other computer you can see it takes a few seconds there and then it updates and now it also shows green up here and I can see both accounts sharing it. So now anything one types the other will see. You can see it appear here on the second computer.
So we're collaborating live. But we don't have to collaborate live. I could close it here on the first computer and continue to work on it here on the second. Then when I open it back up on the first I'll see the changes there. So you can work in real time or you can just take turns working on the document. It doesn't really matter. It works all the same.
Now if I wanted to I could create a second document and let's say let's have the second account create that. So, create a new Pages document. We'll just call this one Second and we'll save it in that same Project X folder. Now we'll look here on the first account and we'll see it added there. See there it got added. Now we can go in and take a look there at that document. So you can see how you can have multiple documents. You're both working in this collaborative space where you could create various different documents. 
You can do that same thing with Numbers or Keynote. Let's launch Numbers here on the first account. Create a new document. We'll save it and we'll place it in that Project X folder. Then here we'll see that document appear here on the second computer. I can double click on that one to open it. You can see you update one and it updates the other.
Now if I wanted to stop sharing this folder I could do it by going to the folder, here I'm going to try that on the second account. I'm going to select it and I'm going to hit the Share button, Show People, and you could see there's me and then there's the original account. It gets confusing because I'm using the same name. I can click on the three dots there and you see I can Remove Me from this. So I can stop sharing from this end or the original owner of this can select that. Go into Shared, Show People, and can go and choose that second account which has a different name here since it's taken from the Contacts List. So I'll click there and you can see I can remove access to this person. So on either end you can kind of cut things off.
Just remember that, of course, there's is an owner for this folder which in this case is this first account here. It's the one that created it. That one is the one that can basically cut people off but gets to keep the files that are in there. 
So this is really useful for teams working on a project. But it's also really useful if you have somebody you regularly collaborate with. You can just create this Shared Folder. Give people access to it. You can both work on any files you want inside of that folder. You can just always use that folder for whenever you want to collaborate without having to worry about setting it up each time for each document.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Collaborating With Shared iCloud Drive Folders”

Ian MacGregor

5 years ago

I'm very security minded and I have a question. Once the shared folder is created and you add a person.. can that person see or access anything else, other than that shared folder, on my iCloud Drive? I have the 50GB iCloud plan and this seems a better method than my 2GB dropbox account.

Gary Rosenzweig

Ian: No. They have the access you specified to that folder, but they can't even see anything else you have. The just see that one folder.

Rien de Zeeuw

My friends iMac is not upgradable to Catalina, he uses High Sierra. I have Catalina. Can we work in one shared iCloud folder? Thanks for your answer in advance.

Rien: No. You need Catalina to use Shared iCloud Drive folders. Stick with just sharing individual files with him, or use another cloud solution like Dropbox until he gets a newer machine.

Adam Snyder

Excellent info Gary.
Once again Apple has done much better that the others out there. I use Microsoft's cloud based everything at work as that is what our company provides for us. Collaborating is a nightmare at times with Cloud based Excel spreadsheets. It's look as though Apple is behind the curve on getting this rolled out, however doing a much better well thought out job than others. Currently using iCloud Drive shared folders at home now.

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Collaborating With Shared iCloud Drive Folders

Comments: 5 Responses to “Collaborating With Shared iCloud Drive Folders”

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