Collaboration on a document

Sharing and collaborating on documents in the OneDrive repository is not a new feature. Still, Office 2021 has taken it to a significantly higher level. Collaboration on a document is available in most Office applications, and in this “recipe” we will focus on Excel: how to share a document, how to see what your peers are doing, and how Sheet View works – a view of a document in which you see your own changes.

Sharing a document begins by first saving it to the desired location within the OneDrive repository. Then click the Share button in the upper right corner of the Excel window. A window will appear in which you need to enter the e-mail addresses of the people with whom you want to share the document. These can be associates inside or outside your organization. Clicking the Send button will send them a link to the document. When the other person opens the document, you will see the cursor within the document which will be a different color. In the upper right corner of the cursor box you will see the initials of the person working on the document. The look of the worksheet changes in real time, in accordance with the changes created by your collaborators.

If you want to focus exclusively on your own changes, that you have made to a single document, you can use Sheet View. To do this, you need to go to the View ribbon, so within the Sheet View group of options on the left, click the New button. The appearance of the screen will change, the row and column headers will turn black. This means that you now only see your own changes within the document. Clicking Exit leaves this view, and Keep allows you to save the view. This can be useful if, for example, you have filtered a table.

If you have previously saved a view, clicking the Options button opens a dialog box where you can open, duplicate, rename, or delete it. This way you can create multiple views of the document that you can activate at your own discretion.