Spreadsheets usually don’t live in vacuums. In fact, it’s often useful to share them with teams in your office or around the world. Fortunately, Excel offers multiple easy ways to do exactly that. Let’s learn how to share files in Microsoft Excel.
How to Share Files in Excel
Part of the power of spreadsheets comes from the way they communicate and illustrate data. It’s often useful to share them with others. Excel’s Share menu offers two great ways to do it.
Before choosing your option, it pays to consider your mission, and what you’re trying to accomplish by sharing your spreadsheet. If you want to collaborate with a team, your best option is to share the file with a service like Microsoft OneDrive. This way, whenever someone on your team makes an edit, it will update the master file and be visible to everyone.
If, however, you only want to share data, and don’t need others to make edits, you can simply email a copy to a list of recipients. Let’s look at both options.
To share in Excel, click on the Share menu. You’ll find this in the upper right corner of Excel’s ribbon, no matter what tab you happen to be working on.
By default, Excel asks you to name your file and save it to OneDrive. As mentioned, this is the best bet if you want to collaborate with others in real-time as they make edits. If you’re sharing this way, give your file a name and click Save.
To email the file, click on Send a Copy. Your email client will launch, and you can send the file as an attachment to a list of recipients. This is a good way to preserve a static copy of your file to share with others.
As you can see, sharing files is easy in Microsoft Excel.
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