Excel 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 22. Worksheet Collaboration

Armed with Excel, there’s a lot you can do on your own to analyze data. But Excel pros aren’t content to struggle in solitude. Instead, they invite their friends, colleagues, and coworkers to join in.

There are plenty of reasons to collaborate on an Excel document. For example, you may want to hand a worksheet off to a friend who can fix a wonky formula or fill in missing data. Or you might want to run your numbers through a review process so your colleagues can comment and flag potential issues. Or perhaps you’re even more ambitious, and you’re looking for a way that will let your whole team add data to the same spreadsheet at the same time. Excel’s collaboration features meet all these requirements handily.

In Chapter 21, you saw the first of Excel’s collaboration features, worksheet protection. Using it, you can lock down sheets so people can make changes only in specific cells. Along with worksheet protection, Excel has several other collaboration tools you’ll learn about in this chapter:

• Comments. Excel’s comments feature lets you insert questions, suggestions, or other miscellaneous notes that point to specific cells (like “This number’s wrong” or “Please boost the sales estimate so we can impress the boss”). The person who created the spreadsheet can then respond to these comments by modifying the spreadsheet.

• Change tracking. Change tracking lets you keep track of the edits made by multiple people. You can then choose to apply or reject some ...