Microsoft Office

Part IV
Using Advanced Excel Features
Sharing a Workbook with Yourself
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f you plan to use shared workbooks, spend time experimenting with the various settings to ensure that you
understand how sharing works. You don’t need to enlist a colleague to help you — you can share a workbook
with yourself. Just launch a second instance of Excel and then open a shared workbook in both
instances. Make changes, save the file, adjust the settings, and so on. Before long, you’ll have a good understanding
of Excel’s shared workbooks.
Resolving conflicting changes between users
As you may expect, multiple users working on the same file can result in some conflicts. For example,
assume that you’re working on a shared customer information workbook, and another user also has the
workbook open. If you and the other user both make a change to the same cell, a conflict occurs. You can
specify the manner in which Excel resolves the conflicts by selecting one of two options in the Advanced
tab of the Share Workbook dialog box:
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Ask Me Which Changes Win: If you select this option, Excel displays a dialog box to let you
determine how to settle the conflict.
The Changes Being Saved Win: If you select this option, the most recently saved version always
takes precedence.
Notice that the second option, The Changes Being Saved Win, has slightly deceptive wording.
Even if the other user saves his changes, any changes you make will automatically override his
changes when you save the workbook. This option may result in a loss of data because you won’t have any
warning that you’ve overwritten another user’s changes.
CAUTION
Controlling the Include in Personal View settings
The final section of the Advanced tab of the Share Workbook dialog box enables you to specify settings that
are specific to your view of the shared workbook. You can choose to use your own print settings and your
own data-filtering settings. If you don’t place check marks in these check boxes, you can’t save your own
print and filter settings.
Tracking Workbook Changes
Excel has a feature that enables you to track changes made to a workbook. You may want to use this feature
if you send a workbook to someone for reviewing. When the file is returned, you can then see what changes
were made and then accept or reject them accordingly.
Turning Track Changes on and off
To enable change tracking, choose Review ➪ Changes ➪ Track Changes ➪ Highlight Changes, which
displays the Highlight Changes dialog box, shown in Figure 30.5. Then place a check mark in the Track
Changes While Editing check box.
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