The activity dashboard is one of the “hidden” or overlooked features of Google Docs that I use on a fairly regular basis. It’s a handy little feature to use whenever you’re sharing a document, but is particularly useful when sharing with more than one other person. Through the activity dashboard you can see who the document is shared with, who has viewed it, how many times it has been viewed, how many comments have been added, and you can review the privacy settings for your document. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to access the activity dashboard in Google Docs. 

Applications for Education

The activity dashboard in Google Docs can be helpful to get a sense of how your shared documents are being used within your school or department. For example, I’ll use it to see trends in how often and when documents that I share with my department are access. It’s also helpful for quickly tracking revisions to collaboratively edited documents.

It’s important to note that this option is only available to Google Workspace users and not available to consumer (Gmail-based) accounts.