Share a Google Sheet with External Clients on a monday.com Board

Sharing a live Google Sheet with an external client on a monday.com board is one of those tasks that should be trivial and almost never is. Two permission systems have to line up — monday’s board access for the guest, and Google’s file sharing for the underlying Sheet — and a misstep in either one means the client opens the board and sees a blank embed or a “request access” prompt.

This post walks through the setup that just works.

Step 1 — Get the client onto the monday board

External clients become guests on a monday workspace. Guest seats are limited and metered differently from full members, so check your monday plan first.

1. From your board’s top bar, click Invite (or Board members depending on your monday plan).
2. Add the client’s email and assign them as a Guest (not a member).
3. Restrict their permissions to view-only or comment-only as appropriate.

The client gets an invitation email from monday.com. They accept, log in or create a free monday account, and they can now see the board.

Step 2 — Add the Google Easy Embed view to the board

If the board doesn’t already have a Google Easy Embed view:

1. Click the + next to your existing view tabs.
2. Choose Apps and select Google Easy Embed.
3. Click Connect to Google and pick the Sheet from the Drive picker.

The Sheet now appears as a board view.

Step 3 — Share the Sheet with the client’s Google account

This is the part most people skip. Easy Embed renders the Sheet inside monday, but it doesn’t grant Google access — Google’s own sharing settings still apply. So:

1. Open the Sheet directly in Google Sheets (separate tab).
2. Click Share.
3. Add the client’s email as a Viewer (or Commenter / Editor depending on what you want them to be able to do).
4. Click Send (or copy the share link).

The client doesn’t have to be in your Google Workspace organisation — sharing with any Google account works.

Step 4 — Match the access mode on the embed

Set the Access mode on the Easy Embed view to match what you shared in Google:

• Shared as Viewer → Easy Embed access mode: View.
• Shared as Commenter → Easy Embed access mode: Comment.
• Shared as Editor → Easy Embed access mode: Edit.

Mismatch and the client may see Google’s standard sharing prompts when they try to interact. See the permissions and sharing help article for the full table.

The client experience

When the client opens the board:

1. They see the Easy Embed view with the Sheet rendered inline.
2. The first time, Google may prompt them to confirm their identity. Subsequent visits load silently.
3. Edits they make in the Sheet (if Edit mode is on) sync straight back to your Google Sheet in real time, the same as any other Google collaborator.

What to do when the client sees “Request access”

This means the Sheet hasn’t been shared with their Google account directly. Two fixes:

• Re-share the Sheet in Google. Open Sheets → Share → make sure the client’s email is on the list.
• Check they’re signed into the right Google account. Many people are signed into a personal Google account in the browser they’re using; the share email may have gone to their work account, or vice versa. They can use Google’s account switcher to fix this.

When to keep the data away from the embed entirely

Some data shouldn’t be inside an embed view, even with strict permissions:

• Personally identifying information the client shouldn’t see (other clients’ contact details, internal staff data).
• Pricing matrices you don’t want benchmarked.
• Internal forecasts that aren’t customer-facing.

For these cases:

• Put the customer-facing data on its own Sheet (not a tab in a master Sheet).
• Embed only that Sheet.
• Use Restricted as the access mode and manage who can see it in Google Sheets directly.

The point is: don’t embed a sensitive master Sheet and hope the client only looks at one tab. They can navigate to other tabs.

Try it

Install Google Easy Embed from the monday.com marketplace. The whole setup — invite guest, add Easy Embed view, share Sheet — takes under five minutes once you’ve done it the first time.

Related reading

• Help: permissions and sharing
• Help: access modes
• Embedding Google files in monday.com — your options compared