Time to make up: Realtime collaboration comes to Excel Microsoft has announced a "significant" step in Excel for Office 365 users on PCs. Users of the giant's trademark Excel spreadsheet package can now work on a document at the same time as colleagues. It means you can jointly edit Excel documents stored on SharePoint Online, OneDrive or OneDrive for Business rather than fields …
At last, a technological breakthrough that will truly bring about the end of the world. All the people with MBAs who can **** things up by buying / moving / closing businesses based on bug-ridden scary 135 worksheet spreadsheets can now do it collaboratively in real time.
In particular I look forward to Davis, Johnson and 'Disgraced' Fox collaborating on Brexit.xlsx from their respective bed-rooms in Chevening (with the Russians having full access too, obviously)
The desktop version of old (2003?) had a facility we liked a lot - called shared spreadsheets or similar and it sort of worked most of the time. The trouble is it was very flaky and would hang - we got fed up of round tripping it through openoffice every week to clear out the cruft.
I have tried the online version but it still has a way to go in the user friendly department.
Open/Libre office never got there either.
This was already possible with Office 2010 right after Microsoft launched SkyDrive (now OneDrive).
And I'm not just saying mind you, check this MSDN article from 2013. This involves Team Foundation, but even so that was still a way to perform team edits on Office documents.
Or what about this Office support article on co-authoring?
I quote: "When you're using Office and your document is on SharePoint or OneDrive, when everyone is done, you have a finished document, there's no need to copy and reformat.". As said: I've been using this with Office 2010 for years now.
Will be interesting to see how much they have to disable to get this working. VBA will almost certainly not be allowed. You probably won't be able to insert tables or do much in the way of changing the structure of a spreadsheet. Probably not much more functionality than current shared workbooks.
umm, put it in a SQL database and massage it from there instead of in a freaking spreadsheet that's so highly sensitive to corruption? If you're big enough to need to actively "collaborate" in a SINGLE spreadsheet, aren't you big enough to hire a DBA and do things properly? In legacy, non-collaborative mode, when a spreadsheet corrupts, it's only going to piss off one person at a time. So just imagine the fun when there are 20 or 30 simultaneous users in said spreadsheet and you have two bytes somewhere in the binary skeleton of the file that get swapped. (Although, on a positive note, if you fix it, you look like a hero to 20 or 30 people at once)
Was the functionality already here for years or not? Whatever the answer, it shows how functionalities are difficult to use and access in MS Products. Obscurity, complexity, making half of the job, all these words fit very well with whatever tools makes Microsoft.
For the one used to work with G Drive apps, working with MS is like going back in the dark ages when programs were made by IT people for IT people, and screw the typical user who does not think like aforementioned IT people.
About three years ago I had some users sharing an Excel file to record quotes they had done. A worksheet that started as 50k grew rapidly to 600Mb as Excel tried to do it's versioning & sharing thing, it clogged the file server with locking errors & gradually brought down every machine that touched it. After washing it through libreoffice I moved the data into SQL & gave them a simple editing screen. One day's development gave them a much better system & got all their machine's running at a decent speed.
I also went the full "Linus" on my users explaining why you don't share spreadsheets or use them for database jobs. To this day if I'm walking round the office I see users swiftly hiding an instance of Excel afraid I might spot their illegal use of a spreadsheet.
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