Excel Track Changes Feature

It all depends on which version of Excel you are using.

Older versions of Excel for Desktop had a Shared Workbook feature.

Shared Workbooks have limitations, and one, in particular, is the inability to edit using Excel for the web.

Therefore Microsoft highly recommends you to use co-authoring, which is the replacement for Shared Workbooks and is available in more recent versions of Excel for Desktop.

However, you lose the track changes feature with co-authoring, so let’s not go that way.

If you want to use the Track Changes feature, you need to use Shared Workbooks, even in newer Excel versions - and for that, if you’re on a Windows machine, you’ll need to go to Review -> Shared Workbooks.

Suppose Mac is your OS, and you can’t find the option in your Ribbon.

In that case, you’ll need to re-enable it by adding it to the Ribbon (Excel > Preferences > Ribbon & Toolbar - from there, you can edit it and add your legacy component from Review > Changes > Track Changes).

Shared workbooks are nice because they are supported by most versions of Excel and work on your infrastructure with your shared network drive.

It’s pretty useless, though, for spreadsheets that are still being developed and heavily refactored as the restrictions (like not being able to add charts or delete sheets) are too limiting.

Also, the change history gets quickly very noisy as it’s just a long list of actions without the possibility to group a set of changes into logical steps with an explanation of what happened (e.g. “added a new column for next year”).

Here’s a set of limitations you should be aware of when using Shared Workbooks:
- It’s official legacy, i.e., Microsoft will not put any more work into them.

- They need to be stored on a shared network drive for optimal functionality.

- You can’t edit a shared workbook with Excel Online.

- You can’t use a workbook that contains VBA or Tables.

- Once shared, you can’t use many items or actions (they will be disabled) like Creating/changing charts, deleting sheets, changing/deleting array formulas, inserting/deleting blocks of cells, adding/changing conditional formats, etc.

- Changes that you make to cell contents are tracked, but other changes, such as formatting, are not tracked.

- The history of tracked changes is stored within the workbook, which means that the longer the history, the bigger the Excel file. To keep the Excel file in a manageable state, Excel defaults to 30 days of history (this can be changed to a very high number, though).

Excel doesn’t offer a clean alternative to it as they prefer to put their focus on the recent Co-Authoring features.

However, you can still use your own Excel files and extend Excel’s collaboration features with Layer, including the ability to track and review changes.

Why is Layer better than Shared Workbooks:

- While Excel considers it a legacy feature that will eventually disappear, Layer bets firmly on its track changes feature.

- Layer works with tables.

- No need to store your files in a network drive. Layer takes care of pushing the latest version of your file before any collaborator when the time comes to edit the file.

- Layer has a set of features apart from track changes that improve how collaboration works in Excel or Google Sheets files - this means you’ll always be one step ahead in terms of Excel collaboration.

Excel Co-Authoring arrived with the purpose of fight back email back-and-forth and file version chaos.

It works well solving that, but it unlocks new challenges that were solved by legacy Excel releases. Ideally, Excel would allow you to invite different people to edit your file, but would keep you in control over what each collaborator can see or edit, and up to what level their changes impact your workbook.

You could track and then accept or reject any proposed changes and prevent errors from creeping in.

This is what we’ve built Layer to do.

To take your Excel files and extend its collaboration capabilities. You can simply upload it and select which ranges each collaborator should have access to.

Sharing is done automatically and consolidation too, putting file owners in charge of reviewing any proposed changes before approving or rejecting them.

There’s no need to migrate or convert your data to a new platform or format.

It just works.