14. Collaborating with Others

PICTURE YOURSELF COMPILING a large workbook, combining lots of data from a variety of sources, and working with one or more other people on the project. It would be very handy to be able to keep an eye on what’s being added or changed over the life of the project, including knowing who made the changes and additions. Excel 2010 makes it really easy to do just that, providing several features for editing a workbook collaboratively—from literally marking all changes with the name of the contributor and the date and time of his or her contribution, to the use of comments to provide information about any cell in the workbook.

In addition to these collaborative tools, Excel also makes it simple to create rules, in the form of onscreen prompts that range from a nudge to a “stop right there!” approach, to help keep your workbook content consistent. From literally forcing users to enter only a certain type of data into particular ranges of cells to providing a gentle reminder to follow formatting rules for data entry, you can easily help your workbooks’ users make their contributions cleaner and more useful.

Finally, to bring the collaborative concept full circle, Excel 2010 provides several ways to bring content from other applications into an Excel workbook, and also to export Excel content to other applications. This enables you to have consistency throughout various reports, databases, presentations, and documents, as well as within multiple Excel worksheets in one or more workbooks.