Creating a shortcut in Google Drive for existing Lucidchart file

Hi Mike,

Great question. If you’d like to create a link in Google Drive to a Lucidchart file owned by someone else, even with view-only access, here are a few options depending on your setup:

1. Use the Share Link:

   • Open the Lucidchart document you want to reference.

   • Click Share → Copy Link.

   • Go to your Google Drive folder, click New → File Shortcut, and paste that Lucidchart URL when prompted.

   • This creates a direct shortcut in Drive that points to the Lucidchart file.

2. Add to “My Drive” (if Lucid–Google integration is enabled):

   • If your organization uses the Lucid + Google Workspace integration, open the file in Lucidchart and click File → Add to My Drive.

   • This option syncs the file as a shortcut within your Drive, but ownership and permissions remain with the original creator.

Hope this is helpful.

Regards

Ria

Thank you for responding, Ria.

Option 1 works great in Windows Explorer (I’m actually already doing that).  It does not, however work in Google Drive; the New button doesn’t offer a “File Shortcut” option.  As an aside, doing them in Windows Explorer creates a “.url” file but Google Drive doesn’t know what to do with it.

As for option 2, we are using the Lucid/Google Workspace integration (which is, apparently, why files I create show up in that Lucidchart folder under My Drive) but there is no “Add to My Drive” option under Lucidchart’s File menu.

I didn’t make it clear in my response above but the question still remains:  how do we create a Lucidchart link in Google Drive to a Lucidchart file that was created by someone else--even if our access to it is read only?

Hi ​@Mike Shelton, thank you for posting in the community! I’m happy to share more information. To share a document on Google Drive, follow these steps:

1. Right-click any file from the “Lucidchart” folder in your Google Drive.
2. Select Share.
3. Enter your collaborator’s information.
4. Click Done.

Then, your collaborator can access the Lucidchart document by right-clicking the file and selecting Open With > Lucidchart. Please note the following:

• If you share a document via Google Drive, these sharing permissions will not be noted in the document’s collaboration settings on Lucidchart. To remove collaborator’s permissions, simply unshare the document on Google Drive.
• Permissions will be inherited from Lucidchart or Google Drive based on which one has greater permissions. For example, if a document is shared with Edit access in Lucidchart to a user who only has read access in Google Drive, the user will still receive edit access.

For more details about our Google Drive integration, I recommend checking the Integrate Lucidchart with Google Drive article from our Lucid Help Center.

I hope this helps! Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions. 

I appreciate the responses to my question but I, obviously, didn’t state my question clearly.

We have a Lucidchart document that someone else created and gave me read-only access.  Because I didn’t create the document, the shortcut does not automatically appear in my own Lucidchart folder (with the Lucidchart/Google Workspace integration).

I need to create a shortcut in a Google Drive folder to that Lucidchart document.  There has got to be a way to create that shortcut; how do I do it?