Google Sheets is one of the easiest ways to create a document that lives on the web online (not on your computer). By default, documents that you create are owned by you and viewable only by you. But you can make it shareable so that others can view and update them. You can make it so that others can only view it and not update them - or you can make it so that others can update the document too. The good thing of having the document reside online is that everyone sees the latest version of the document. I have seen people trying to share excel sheets by emailing them to a group - imagine trying to resolve updates made by different people. There will always be someone who works with an older version and makes changes on top of it, and then they email it around - only to realize later that what they updated is missing updates made by someone else. An online Google Sheet document solves those issues.

So how do you share a Google Sheet with others ?

By default you get this

Clicking the 'Copy link' button gets you a html link that you can email to anyone. Notice the 'Anyone with the link' text - that means that anyone that has access to this link can view your document. So this means that even if you did not email the link to a person, they could have gotten the link from someone that got it from you. Also Notice the 'Viewer' text - that means that others can view your document but they will not be able to make updates.

I don’t recommend those options for most usages.

Instead , make the access ‘Restricted’ and type in email of the person whom you want to share it with This opens up another window - where you can add more emails and also set the document permissions. If you don’t want others to update the document, keep it as ‘Viewer’. But if you want to give others the ability to update the document, then set it to ‘Editor’

Here’s another scenario if you need even finer control. Say you have given access to someone specifically by their email and made them Editor. So you have given access to only 1 person. But that person in turn can share with anyone. How do you prevent that? Here are controls that prevents Editors from sharing further. You can also prevent folks from downloading, copying and printing. Here are settings for these.