Following on from my post about co-authoring in Word 2010, Joseph from Microsoft recent published the Excel equivalent: Collaborative Editing Using Excel Web App.
"The goal of the collaboration work we did in Excel Web App was to remove the “locked file” experience from users’ workflow in collaborative scenarios and enable interesting new ways for people to work together around spreadsheets. There are still times when locking a file for exclusive access is the desired behavior, and SharePoint enables that through checkout. I look forward to hearing about your experiences using these features in your own work. If you have any feedback around how you’d like to see us improve this area going forward, feel free to leave us a comment."
Some notes from Joseph's blog post:
- as with Word 2010, multiple people can open and edit the SAME spreadsheet at the same time.
- as with Word 2010, you have in-spreadsheet notification of presence (who has the spreadsheet open).
- co-authoring in Excel 2010 is ONLY for the Excel Web App, not for the Excel 2010 client itself. We'll have to wait for the next wave of Office to get Excel client co-authoring options.
- as unlike Word 2010, changes are made in real-time, at the cell level, whenever a change is made. This is because the Excel Web App saves continously, so changes are sent continuously.
My thoughts about this:
- it's good to see this new capability.
- the lack of Excel 2010 client support is ... work-aroundable. It's a button click within Excel 2010 to transition the spreadsheet to the Excel Web App, so in conjunction with an IM session to send the file link to a collaborator, it will work.
- because Excel "the client" 2010 will not show collaborative authors, I'm unsure what happens if one person has the spreadsheet open in Excel "the client" 2010 and another person has it open in the Excel Web App. The client guy will feel perplexed if the web gal is making changes that are showing up (at some point) in the file he is working with.
