Excel Collaboration Made Easy

We've all been there: gathering information for a strategic Excel solution may be tiresome to the point of frustration.

If you're managing an Excel collaboration with a group of 20, five individuals could answer right away, ten will need a reminder, and five will require a careful and time-consuming follow-up.

It will most likely take you a few hours to complete the job. Consider how much time a group of 50 or 300 people would spend.

Because we're talking about strategic Excel solutions in Finance, Accounting, HR, or Project Management, this task is most likely being done by a high-paid manager or her or his similarly busy assistant.

Both of them, I suppose, should make better use of their time.

Why does it take so long for people to get back to you after sending a request for input in one of your files?

Complexity is the answer.

Have you ever relied only on your instincts to navigate and insert data into someone's Excel workbook?

It's challenging to navigate an Excel solution without instructions. Especially if your audience is not as used to it as you are.

This frequently results in faulty cell references, meddling with formulas, and incorrect results. When instructions are provided, what started as a two-minute task takes ten times as long. Imagine the costs for the company.

You can only share entire Excel spreadsheets.

Users browsing, looking for where to add their input, navigate through sheets that could include sensitive data.

Not only that, but when sharing your file offline, the copied spreadsheet will live on the collaborator’s computer, and any security steps you took up to that point were for nothing.

A standard solution to ensure data integrity is to create tailored carve-outs of the original data and send them to individual recipients.

Once you get back the data, you must copy-paste it manually to your original spreadsheet.

When you’re finished, in the second-best case scenario, you realize formulas are broken, results don’t match, and you need to scan your file for mistakes.

Again, this extra time could be better used elsewhere.

It's difficult to tell who modified what and when while collecting and updating numbers, whether through co-authoring or manual input.

Are the figures from the same period? Are you looking at the most recent numbers or the ones from the previous month? You can find out by looking through old emails, chat streams, or calling someone.

If you still use Shared Workbooks and dig deep enough, you might be able to identify who made the changes.

But with Co-authoring, Microsoft pulled the plug on Shared Workbooks, and Co-authoring doesn’t support tracking changes.

You can use Layer, a web app that allows you to keep your Excel files but extends its native collaboration capabilities.

When using Layer, you save all of that time you invested when creating your spreadsheet carve-outs,

chasing collaborators and keeping track of their input, or finding and fixing mistakes others made when editing your files.

Keep reading to learn how Layer can help out.