Essential SharePoint

Chapter 5. Sharing Workspaces and Lists with Excel

Excel can use SharePoint a number of different ways:

• Share workbooks through document workspaces

• Maintain version history of workbooks through document libraries

• Share parts of a worksheet through lists

• Publish completed workbooks as web pages

• Display worksheets on web pages through web parts

• Program SharePoint from Excel VBA

This chapter discusses these tasks from a user's perspective. If you are an administrator, you can use this chapter to help educate Excel users on new SharePoint features.

Getting Started with Excel and SharePoint

If you've ever tried to collaborate on a budget, project bid, or other team-oriented workbook in Excel, you know that just putting the .XLS file up on a public server doesn't cut it. Only one person can edit the workbook at a time, and if somebody leaves the file open and goes to lunch, the rest of the team is locked out until you find out who the culprit is and get him to close his session.

Earlier versions of Excel solved this problem with shared workbooks , which let more than one user have a single workbook open for editing. Changes were merged automatically, and conflicting changes could be resolved. That's a start, but it's a file-based system, so there is no way to manage the document's users, notify teammates of changes, assign tasks, or do other team-oriented work.

SharePoint solves this problem through shared workspaces and shared lists. From an Excel perspective, shared workspaces represent a workbook ...