Sharing & Permissions
Who can link, remove, and restore documents on a shared sheet, and how removal and undo actually work.
Sheetminer is usually used on a sheet that someone else also has open, so the questions that come up most aren’t about extraction - they’re about who’s allowed to change what. This page covers how the access model works, and what Google enforces before Sheetminer is even involved.
Who can link and remove documents
Anyone who can edit the sheet can link a document to it, remove a document, or restore one. There’s no ownership check, so it doesn’t matter who originally added the document - removing one works the same way as editing a cell.
That mirrors how Google Sheets itself behaves: if you can edit the sheet, you can change what’s in it. The alternative would be a shared workbook where one person’s uploaded documents were untouchable by everyone else, which tends to cause more problems than it solves on a finance or audit sheet.
Access is limited to editors
Sheetminer confirms your access by verifying that you’ve used the add-on on that sheet. It doesn’t read any role information from Google, so that check on its own would let any collaborator through.
In practice it doesn’t, because Google enforces the rule before Sheetminer is involved. A script or add-on only runs for people who can edit the file, and view-only or comment-only collaborators can’t run it at all. If you can’t edit the sheet, you can’t open Sheetminer on it, so you have no way to reach the document list.
So everyone who can link, remove, or restore a document can already edit the sheet, and those actions don’t give them anything they didn’t have before.
The one case worth naming: if someone loses edit access after using the add-on, our record of their access remains, but they can no longer open Sheetminer to use it.
Removing a document is reversible
Removing a document no longer discards its link to the sheet. Sheetminer marks it as removed instead, and the Undo toast that appears right after the action puts it back - including the per-cell source references, so Inspect keeps working on the cells that came from that document.
Removing a document has no effect on the file in Google Drive. It’s the link between the sheet and the document that changes, not the document itself.
There’s no trash view
Undo is available in the moment, right after you remove a document. There’s no “recently deleted” or trash screen to come back to later, so once that toast has gone there’s no way to restore from inside the add-on.
Nothing is purged on a timer
Removed links are kept indefinitely at the moment. There’s no retention window and no automatic cleanup running. If that changes, the policy will be documented here.