Share Workbook and Tracking changes removed from Excel [EN]

That’s not exactly my usual tip article for Office 365, but i thought i should still share this information. In July Office 365 client (MS Office suite) in the Current Channel has been updated. They have added a realtime collaboration feature (as well as AutoSave) to Excel application. This made possible to work with Excel document the same way as it was possible in Word before. Although a number of conditions must apply. First the file should be stored in OneDrive or SharePoint Online. And you also has to access it via a browser and then select to edit it in MS Excel. Opening a file from your OneDrive folder on your PC doesn’t activate those features. That’s all cool and dandy (although while trying it in Word we have found that it often doesn’t work that well). But this also gave the reason for MS to remove older features like Share Workbook and Tracking changes from the Office Ribbon in Excel. These features allowed to get a somewhat similar (although not realtime) results, but when files are stored on a Windows share or sent via email. In our company we are still heavily using Share Workbook feature, so it was an annoying thing to find out. Fortunately MS wasn’t dumb enough to completely remove them. One can still find these buttons in File > Options > Customize Ribbon > All Commands and add them to a custom tools group (you can create that group in the same place these buttons were before). The buttons have “(Legacy)” label attached to them. So this explains MS’s thinking to retire these features in favor of the new ones, which encourage to use their cloud services even more.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *