A shared workbook needs to reside on a shared drive in order forothers to collaborate on it. When a shared workbook is edited and thensaved, users connected to the same workbook will see the changesautomatically. If you created the workbook, then youcan control the user access as the owner of the workbook and have theoption to stop sharing the workbook at any time.
Please note that certain functionality is not available after theworkbook becomes a shared workbook, so it is best to make sure that allformatting is complete prior to sharing it.
The following steps demonstrate how you would share a workbook withothers in order to collaborate together on the same workbook:
- Usethe ChoclatoFlak.xlsx workbook forthis example.
- Click to select the
Share icon, on the veryright-hand side of the Home tab, as illustrated in thefollowing screenshot:
- The
Share pane will open to theright of the worksheet, with an icon named Save to Cloud. Click on this icon.
- Add recipients from saved contacts oradd email addresses into the
Invite people recipientplaceholder provided. Choose whether to grant edit viewprivileges and then select either Ask me, Always, or Never fromthe Automatically sharechanges heading, as illustrated in the followingscreenshot:
- Click on Share to complete theprocess, or use Get a sharinglink at the bottom of the dialog box to send thelink to recipients via email.
- The recipients will receive the email, after which they will clickon Open toaccess the shared workbook, as illustrated in the followingscreenshot:
Those recipients sharing the workbook will be displayed near thebottom of the Excel Share pane. Onlyone contributor can edit the workbook at one time, so you will see thatyou can only view the workbook when another contributor closes thefile.