Excel lets you share a workbook and edit worksheets simultaneously. It also allows multiple people to edit every cell or spreadsheet and track changes at the same time. Collaboration between your team will never be the same plus you will be maintaining just one workbook for the entire team which results to less confusion and an updated version for everyone. Updated data will always be available all the time. You can track changes from everybody across the network using their login names and the date they made the update. Excel also prompts you which version of the edit will be posted or you can set it to always overwrite the old ones.
The workbook however need to be in a network share. it must have a write privilege to all your team members. Using Excel 2007, sharing a workbook is as simple as point and click. Here follow these steps.
You can use the double slash [ \\ ] to access your file server like this \\FILESERVER
Delete your local version to remove confusion and open the file from the server
You can also create a shortcut to your desktop so that it may be easier for you to open it.
The workbook however need to be in a network share. it must have a write privilege to all your team members. Using Excel 2007, sharing a workbook is as simple as point and click. Here follow these steps.
- Open your workbook.
- Navigate to Review on the toolbar
- Click on the Share Workbook icon
- Place a check on the check box that says Allow more than one user at the same time.
- Click on OK
- Now, save your workbook on a network share
You can use the double slash [ \\ ] to access your file server like this \\FILESERVER
Delete your local version to remove confusion and open the file from the server
You can also create a shortcut to your desktop so that it may be easier for you to open it.
One of the easiest ways to share workbooks among team members is with the Excel add-in Distributed Spreadsheet. Users are assigned to individual pages, version tracking is automatic and the distribution and collection process is fully automated. Sharing workbooks using only Excel's tools is quite a challenge. Distributed Spreadsheet makes it easy.
Excel is a a wonderful product but expensive for an SME like ours. What we have instead is Google Spreadsheet on our Google Apps account for our company domain. It works perfectly fine and got just enough features to get the job done.
Nice tips though for MS Office users. I'll give this one a try. Thanks.
@Dan the problem with that is if you would rely too much on Google Docs, and then suddenly it goes offline.