How to Share Excel Workbook?

Share an Excel Workbook (Table of Contents)

• How to Share an Excel Workbook?
• Track Changes in an Excel Workbook
• Accept or Reject Changes in an Excel Workbook

Share an Excel Workbook

It is a common process of sharing a workbook with teammates and subordinates. One of the common ways of sharing the workbook is through email if the file size is small or if the file size is large then we will rely on either dropbox or on one drive link. This isn’t the stranger thing who works in corporate offices. But how do you know what are the changes they made? What if you can have the option of accepting or rejecting their changes?

Isn’t it a wonderful thing to have which just eliminates the worries?

Yes, we can call these things in excel workbook. In this article, we will show you how to share an excel workbook with complete accountability on the workbook.

How to Share an Excel Workbook?

Sharing excel workbook involves many steps. Follow the below steps to share the excel workbook with your friends, colleagues, and subordinates.

Step 1: Open the Excel workbook that you would like to share.

Step 2: In the ribbon, we have many tabs, so go to Review tab and click on Share Workbook.

Step 3: Now in the next window under the Editing tab check the box as shown below.

In the same window, we can see who has opened the workbook at the same time.

This is the easiest way of sharing the workbook, but how about tracking the changes? We will see now in the below window.

Track Changes in an Excel Workbook

Under the Review tab, we can track changes in excel that are made by the users. There are situations where users many make unintentional mistakes, finding the error in the huge file could be a time-consuming job for anybody since we have excel’s built-in function “Track Changes” we can easily track those changes.

To track changes I have prepared below sample data.

Before we share the excel workbook we need to enable the Track Changes option. Follow the below steps to enable Track Changes.

Step 1: Click on the Track Changes drop-down list and choose “Highlight Changes”.

Step 2: Check the box Track Changes while editing.

Step 3: Now in the same window we can choose a variety of options like “from when we need to start highlighting the changes”, “whose changes we need to highlight” and “which range or part of the cells we need to highlight”.

In the above window, we can see three options “When, Who, and Where”.

When includes options like from when we need to highlight changes. This option has items like “Since I last saved”, “All”, “Not Yet reviewed”, and “Since Date”.

Who: For whose changes we need to highlight. In this, we can see two things “Everyone” or “Everyone But Me”.

Where: This is nothing but in which area of the worksheet you would like to highlight changes, if you don’t want to track changes in the entire worksheet then you can select the particular area or range of cells.

Once all the fields are filled click on OK to apply the changes. As soon as you click on Ok, we will see the below window.

Click on Ok to save the workbook.

Now what I will do is I will change one of the cells data.

As soon as I hit enter I can see the flag which indicates the changes.

Not only the cell flag rather row header and column header also turned into different color as well.

Now place a cursor on the cell that we have modified to see the changes that we made.

It says on 31st July 2019 at 2:31 PM cell C6 value has been changed from 20 to 25.

Now I will enter the new value in the cell E3.

For this cell, we cannot see any highlight changes, because while making the settings of “Track Changes” we have selected the range of cells to be tracked only from A1 to D13.

So any changes we made outside this range will not be tracked.

Accept or Reject Changes in an Excel Workbook

The beauty of Track Changes not only limited to viewing the changes rather we can accept or reject the changes as well.

Under Track Changes click the option “Accept / Reject Changes”.

In the below window we can filter out whose changes we need to accept or reject and in which range we need to accept or reject changes.

Click on Ok, to go to the next window.

In the above we can choose the changes, we can Accept or Reject changes. In case if we want to accept all or reject all we can do this as well.

Things to Remember

• Track Change comments are different and regular comments are different.
• Always select the range of cells to be tracked which affects the result area.
• Protect the workbook before you share with anybody.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to Share an Excel workbook. Here we discuss how to share an excel workbook and track changes in it with complete accountability on the workbook. You may learn more about excel from the following articles –

• How to Unprotect Excel Workbook?
• AutoRecover in Excel(Opens in a new browser tab)
• Break Links in Excel(Opens in a new browser tab)
• Themes in Excel
• Import Data into Excel