I met with Rickard Wärnelid of Corality yesterday, and we got talking about collaboration functionality within spreadsheets. (Rickard subsequently posted some comments about using Excel’s shared workbook functionality on his financial model audit blog.) I don’t use Excel’s shared workbook functionality mainly because I do most of my modeling work alone. However, as Rickard points out, Excel spreadsheets that have this sharing functionality turned on have limited functionality – so much so that I could not see myself wanting to use it.
When I do need to work with others (e.g. a client, a colleague) I generally make sure only one of us is in the spreadsheet at any given time. This involves phone calls, emails or IMs to ensure that you are “it” and can safely open the model and make changes. Clearly this is suboptimal – something Google, Zoho, and others have latched onto with their web spreadsheet offerings. Now even Microsoft is coming to the party with Office 2010 – which by all accounts will provide similar collaboration functionality.
I’ve been using Google Docs spreadsheet more and more due to its awesome ability to share spreadsheets with multiple people via the web. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Darren Miller 
