Use Excel 2007 to complete the work of multi-person collaborative input

To improve speed, you may need multiple people working on an Excel table at the same time. In order to meet this requirement, EXCEL2007 provides us with a "shared workbook" feature. With this feature, we can share an Excel file over the network while simultaneously editing this workbook for many people. And while editing, Excel automatically keeps the information constantly updated.

In a shared workbook, users can enter data, insert rows and columns, change formulas, and so on, and even filter out the data they care about and keep their own windows. You can also handle conflicts when multiple people edit a cell at the same time. Let me give you an example of how to share workbooks through Excel2007.

Set up a shared workbook

First let's start Excel2007. After startup, enter a product sales table in it, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Product Sales List

Select the Review menu (which corresponds to the Tools menu in older versions of Excel), and then click the Share Workbook button below the menu to pop up the dialog box for setting up the shared workbook. The results of the operation are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Shared Workbook dialog box

In the Shared Workbook dialog box, select the Allow multiple users to edit simultaneously, and Allow workbook merge check box. You can then make advanced settings more according to your needs. The interface of the advanced settings is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Advanced Settings

As you can see from this interface, Excel can manage the history of shared workbooks, and it can also automatically update changes to other users. By default, the current user updates other users ' changes while saving the file, but we can also set changes that automatically update the workbook at a certain time interval. The first item in the "Conflicting changes between users" setting in part 3rd, "Ask what changes are saved," may produce an indeterminate result. When you have finished setting up, when you click on the "OK" button, you will be prompted to save the document if the current document is not saved. You can save this document in a place that other people can access, such as a shared folder. The interface after the shared workbook is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Shared workbook

After the workbook is shared, the [share] hint appears in the title bar above Excel.

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Second, the use of shared work thin

After you have set up the share, you can use multiple Excel to open the Excel file. Let's use an Excel to edit this "product sales" table. and then save. Switch to another Excel that opens the file, press Ctrl+s to save, and you'll see that the table contents are updated in this Excel. As shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5 The updated interface

After the update, a dialog box like Figure 5 appears, prompting the document to be updated. If two Excel modifies the same cell at the same time, and both are saved, there will be a conflict of content. If a user changes the sales data for product No. No. 0001 to 18, the other user changes the sales volume of product No. 0001 to 20. After they save, the prompt dialog box appears as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6 Conflict Handling dialog box

The user then decides whether to modify the contents of the table by user 1 or by the user.

Not only does Excel handle the current conflict of changes, but it can also query the history of conflicts and modify them according to the history of the conflict. Clicking the Highlight changes item in the Modify button menu on the Review menu displays the dialog box shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7

You can choose to view the history of revisions based on this dialog box. After the selection, a "small corner" appears in the upper-left corner of each cell, and the mouse is placed over the cell to display the modified history of the cell.

Clicking on the Receive/Reject Changes menu item will display the interface shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8

This dialog box shows the values from the initial value to the previous modified (sorted by time from small to large) from a cell. You can click on one of the items in order to revert to the corresponding historical value. You can also revert to the last and original values through the Accept all and reject all buttons.

Excel2007 can also set a password for the workbook to prevent other users from turning off revisions. There is also the workbook can be shared when some advanced operations, such as graphics, charts and so on.