Create a Shared Workbook: Microsoft Excel Tutorial

This tutorial walks you through how to share a Microsoft Excel workbook. Once you have shared a workbook, someone else can make changes to the workbook and merge their changes to this workbook so that they are synchronized and the workbook will reflect the latest changes. Sharing an Excel workbook makes it easy for multiple people to work on the same workbook without having to worry so much about making changes to the latest saved version of the Excel workbook.

1. Open Microsoft Excel

For this tutorial, you will be creating a new Microsoft Excel workbook. Opening Excel will automatically create a new workbook.

2. Click File -> Save As

Name this workbook whatever you wish and save it anywhere on your hard drive. You cannot set a workbook to be shared unless it has been saved.

3. Click Tools -> Share Workbook

This will bring the "Share Workbook" box that has two tabs titled "Editing" and "Advanced". You will notice in the "Editing" tab, it shows you a list of people that have this workbook open at this time. Currently, it should only show your name.

4. Checkmark for "Allow Changes..."

The next step to setting your Microsoft Excel workbook as shared is to checkmark the box that says "Allow changes by more than one user at the same time. This also allows workbook merging."

5. Click "Advanced" Tab

The final step to creating an Excel shared workbook is going to the "Advanced" tab and selecting the options you want to use for your shared Excel workbook. There are 3 sections.

The "Track changes" section lets you select the number of days to keep in the history of the workbook. This is similar to the history of Internet Explorer.

The "Update changes" section lets you choose when the changes get updated to the workbook. You can set it to whenever the workbook is saved or automatically every 10 or 15, or however many minutes. There is an additional option for saving your changes and seeing other's changes or just seeing other's changes without saving your own.

The "Conflicting changes between users" section lets you select what to do in the case of a "deadlock" situation when a change is being made to an outdated version of the workbook or if a change is occurring at the same time.

The "Include in personal view" section lets you select the print and filter settings.

To see the full power of shared Excel workbooks, place this workbook on a network share drive and have another user modify it and merge their changes. To see how to do this, read the previous tutorial on how to merge workbooks.