Sharing and Protecting Excel Sheet.

Excel is having an useful feature for sharing the content across many users.

Consider below scenario.
You are having around 100 test cases in an Excel sheet. Your team is having 5 people.
Assume that your team has to complete execution of the all the 100 cases in very limited time. Execution of some test cases depend of test result from execution of some other cases.

In this above scenario, keeping 5 separate copies of Excel sheets is not an effective. But normally all 5 people can't update a single excel sheet simultaneously.

To resolve the above issue, we can use Share Work book option of Excel.

Clicking Tools->Share workbook will show below screen.


Check the checkbox in the above screen. Now the workbook will be shared. (ie Many people can simultaneously update the workbook).

But anyway we need to take additional care when working with shared workbook.

- Immediately save your changes to avoid any conflict with others changes, and also click save before making any changes. It will help to see recent updates of other users and also it will avoid any conflict with others changes.

- Adding new rows and any new columns should be handled carefully.

Protection feature of the Excel also will be helpful to prevent unauthorized people from changing the Excel content.

It can be done by clicking Tools->Protection->Protection Sheet.

If you want to hide the contents of an Excel sheet to an unauthorized person, then you can click Tools-Protection->Protect work book. Remember to check the "windows" checkbox in "Protect workbook" Dialog box.

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