Collaboration & Sharing

Wafflebase lets multiple people edit the same sheet, document, presentation, or note at the same time — and read and comment on the same PDF. Share via link — no account required for recipients.

Share a Document

1. Open the sheet or document you want to share
2. Click the Share button in the editor header
3. Under Permission, choose the role:
   • Viewer — Can see the content, but not edit
   • Editor — Full editing access
4. Under Expiration, choose No limit, 1 hour, 8 hours, 24 hours, or 7 days
5. Click Create Link — the URL is created and copied to your clipboard

Send the link to anyone. They can open it in their browser without signing in.

Expiration defaults to No limit

Expiration starts on No limit, so a link you create without touching that field never expires — it keeps working until you revoke it. Set a window before you click Create Link if the content is sensitive.

Who can create an editor link

Viewer links are open to any member of the document's workspace. Editor is restricted: only the document's author or an owner of its workspace can create one. Everyone else sees the Editor option greyed out with a note explaining why, and can create viewer links instead. The rule is enforced on the server, not just in the dialog.

Access Levels

Permission	Viewer	Editor
View content	Yes	Yes
Navigate and scroll	Yes	Yes
Select and copy	Yes	Yes
Edit content	No	Yes
Format (cells or text)	No	Yes
Undo/redo	No	Yes

In sheets, editors can also use formulas, insert/delete rows and columns, and resize columns. In docs, editors can apply text formatting and paragraph alignment.

Edit Together

When a collaborator opens your shared link, you'll see:

• Their cursor — In sheets, a colored highlight on their selected cell. In docs and notes, a colored text cursor at their position. In PDFs, you can see who else is viewing the file.
• Their name — A label appears next to their cursor. In sheets and documents it fades about four seconds after they move so the content stays readable; hover their cursor to bring the name back. In notes, slides, and boards the label stays on screen and there is nothing to hover for.
• Live changes — Edits appear instantly with no need to refresh or save

TIP

Each collaborator gets a unique color. If your collaborators sign in with GitHub, their name will appear next to their cursor.

Jump to a collaborator

In sheets and documents, the avatars in the header are clickable: select one to scroll to where that person is working. In documents, their name label reappears when you land so you can confirm whose position you jumped to; in sheets it does not, so if the label has already faded you'll see the colored cell highlight without a name until that person moves again. Your own avatar isn't clickable, and neither is one for a peer whose position isn't known yet.

Is My Work Saved?

A small status chip sits in the editor header and reports whether your edits have reached the server. It has four states:

Chip	What it means
Saved	Connected, and everything you've done is on the server.
Saving…	Connected, and your recent changes are on their way.
Reconnecting…	The connection dropped, but nothing of yours is waiting to be sent.
Not saved	You have changes that aren't reaching the server.

Hover the chip for a fuller explanation of the current state. Not saved is the only state that is loud about itself: if it persists for a couple of seconds, a warning appears, and it clears with a confirmation once your work is actually on the server.

Don't rely on the close prompt

While changes are unsent — that means Saving… as well as Not saved — this browser tab is the only copy of them; nothing is stored on your machine. In either of those two states, closing or reloading the tab may make the browser ask you to confirm first. It is a safety net, not a guarantee: the prompt appears only if a last-moment check still finds work outstanding, so a tab showing Not saved can close without asking. Never read a missing prompt as proof your work is safe — wait for Saved before leaving.

The chip appears in sheets, documents, slides, notes, and boards, and in a share link opened with the Editor role. A Viewer share link shows a View only badge in its place — a viewer makes no changes, so there is nothing for it to report.

Comments & Mentions

Leave feedback without changing the content. Comments work on cells in sheets, on selected text in documents, and on a page region in PDFs. Slides, notes, and boards don't have comments yet.

Add a comment

In a sheet:

1. Select the cell you want to comment on
2. Right-click and choose Insert comment, or press ⌘+Option+M / Ctrl+Alt+M
3. Type your comment and click Comment

In a document:

1. Select the text you want to comment on — a document comment needs a real selection, so nothing happens if the cursor is just sitting somewhere
2. Right-click and choose Insert comment, or press ⌘+Option+M / Ctrl+Alt+M
3. Type your comment and click Comment

The comment icon in the header opens and closes the comments panel; it does not start a comment.

The commented text is highlighted so everyone can see where the discussion is.

In a PDF:

1. Click Add comment in the header
2. Drag a rectangle over the region of the page you want to comment on
3. Type your comment and post it

The comment is pinned to that page and region. Open the comments panel from the header to browse every thread by page. See Viewing PDFs for more.

Reply, resolve, edit

• Reply — Open a comment and click Reply to continue the thread.
• Resolve — Hover the thread and click the check (✓) to resolve it. Resolved threads are tucked away but never lost.
• Edit / Delete — Hover your own comment and use the ⋯ menu. Deleting the first comment removes the whole thread.

The comments panel

Sheets and documents both have a side panel listing every thread. Click the comment icon in the header — or press ⌘+Option+Shift+M / Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M — to open it. Threads are grouped under Open and Resolved tabs; click a thread to jump to the cell or text it belongs to. In a document, if the text a comment was attached to is later deleted, the thread moves to an orphaned list so the conversation is preserved.

PDFs have a comments panel too, opened from the header — see Viewing PDFs.

Mention a teammate

Type @ inside a comment to mention a workspace member. An autocomplete list appears — keep typing to filter, then use ↑ / ↓ and Enter (or Tab) to pick someone. The mention is inserted as a blue chip so it stands out in the thread.

TIP

Mentions highlight who a comment is for. Only people who are members of the workspace can be mentioned.

Notifications

A mention doesn't just stand out in the thread — it reaches the person. The bell in the header carries a badge with your unread count (it stops counting at 99+), and opening it lists what happened, newest first. Select a row to mark it read and jump to what it's about, or use Mark all read to clear the badge.

You are notified when:

• Someone mentions you in a comment
• Someone replies to a thread you've commented in
• Someone resolves a thread you've commented in
• Someone joins a workspace you own, or accepts an invite you created
• A template you published is approved, rejected, or removed from the public gallery, or goes back for review after its document changed
• A template is waiting in the review queue — only if you are one of the deployment's designated template reviewers, and at most one nudge per listing per day

Starting a brand-new thread notifies nobody unless it mentions someone. You are never notified about your own actions, and a reply that mentions you produces one notification, not two.

TIP

The bell only appears when you're signed in — someone reading through a share link has no inbox. Notifications also stay inside the workspace: only workspace members can be notified, and only a workspace member's comment can notify anyone.

Version History

Every sheet, document, presentation, note, and board keeps a history of past versions. The history icon in the editor header opens the panel; each entry can be previewed read-only or restored, and a restore is itself reversible.

Two things about it matter when other people are in the document with you:

• Comments are part of the version being restored. Restoring an older version removes every comment added after it, along with the rest of the newer content.
• History is signed-in only. It is not part of a share link, so a collaborator working through a shared URL has no panel and cannot restore.

The full treatment — naming a version, what a preview shows for each document type, what a restore replaces, and the limits — is in Version History.

How Conflicts Work

What happens if two people edit the same cell or text at the same time?

Wafflebase uses CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) to handle this. Both edits are preserved in the system — the last writer's value is displayed in sheets, and concurrent text insertions are merged in docs. There's no "conflict dialog" or manual merge step.

Slides are the exception: text on a slide is committed as a whole when you click away, not merged keystroke by keystroke. Two people typing in the same text box, shape, table cell, or speaker-notes box will lose one set of edits — see Editing at the Same Time. Everything else in a deck merges normally.

In practice, presence cursors make it easy to see where others are working, so simultaneous edits to the same location are rare.

Manage Share Links

To see or revoke existing links:

1. Open the sheet or document
2. Click Share in the editor header
3. Under Active links you'll see each link's role and expiration — No expiration, a countdown such as Expires in 6h, or Expired
4. Use the copy icon to copy a link again, or the delete icon to revoke it. The delete icon only appears on links you have the authority to revoke — see below

Revoking a link immediately blocks access — anyone with that URL will no longer be able to open it.

You can always revoke a link you created yourself. Revoking links other people created takes the same authority as creating an editor link: the document's author or a workspace owner. Editor links you didn't create aren't listed for you at all, so the token can't be copied and passed on.

Good to Know

• Revoking or expiring a link blocks access immediately
• Deleting a document automatically invalidates all its share links
• Links cannot be guessed — each one is generated with a unique random ID
• New links are created with No limit unless you pick an expiration, so for sensitive data choose a short one (1 hour or 8 hours) before creating the link

Tips for Collaboration

• Use clear names — Title your sheets and documents descriptively so teammates can find them
• Communicate changes — If you restructure columns or reorganize content, let your team know
• Use separate tabs (sheets) — Give each team member their own tab for data entry, with a summary tab that pulls data using formulas