Forum Discussion
What version of Excel (on Windows) is required to do co-authoring?
Eric,
co-authoring is available as of version 1707 build 8326.2058.
Helios Comms wrote:
If you want a shock, get yourself on the insiders channel - boy does Office look *very* different. I've got this running in a test virtual machine. Not sure I like it...
BTW - if you have admin rights on your work computer, you can switch channel yourself. But IT will quite rightly possibly not want to support you :-)
I could (and I do) test monthly channel on my home computer too so that's not a problem. But here, we are speaking of a data sharing feature. It doesn't make much sense to test it *alone*.
My major grief is that I cannot understand why this, ability for several users opening the same excel workbook and have their edits merged using the "save" function, which I've been using for ages with previous Office versions with file located on shared network drives, is still not possible with cloud based storage yet.
As for testing alone, that's what the monthly and targeted annual channels are for. IT can put/switch a few trusted users onto the newer versions for in place testing.
Although from this thread, I recall that co-authouring isn't coming until the next semi-annual release which is a shame. I'm pretty sure Microsoft want it out there as they are loosing customers to Google suite offering two key features late to Office: co-authouring and auto-save. Although there is a lot of resistance to say the least to auto-save from my clients but that's because change is *hard*. They complain when Office crashes and looses documents they haven't saved but then complain when Office automatically saves ones documents to OneDrive and SharePoint. Can't win ;-) Re-training is needed - most of them have no idea that "Version history" is there...
Helios Comms wrote:
Although there is a lot of resistance to say the least to auto-save from my clients but that's because change is *hard*.The sad thing here is that me and my collègues do not need "auto-save" or live co-authoring neither: what we're waiting for is just the ability to synchronize change of edits made on a excel file, opened at the same time, when saving (as we did before switching to cloud).