6.3 Use collaboration and distribution features - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Chris>In this sub lesson,</v> we will discuss how to best share and distribute our Excel work. If your first thought was to email your document, then stop right there. We will look at collaborating on documents and some of the features of Microsoft 365, that allow you to avoid verizontal issues and reduce what is being emailed around. This benefits security, versions, and filling your email box with giant spreadsheets. Let's face it, we collaborate now more than ever. In traditional sharing means, such as email network drives, create challenges with driving collaboration and are no longer effective. Our workforce is dispersed. We have users that are internal to our organization and may be working in many locations and/or time zones. And now we may have external users to our organization that we may want to have collaborate on our documents as well. We have a diverse workforce that has skill levels and all kinds of different experience. And we need to work on drive engagement across all these different organizations and our diverse workforce. So how do we do this? We wanna enable collaboration anywhere, anytime and on any device. To support this we will explore the following features. We'll talk about co-authoring documents, commenting and taking advantage of version history. So first let's talk about co-authoring. So Ammul and I want to open up and work on the exact same workbook at the same time. And as a note, Ammul and myself are actually in different organizations. So I'm operating out of my Iteration Insights Microsoft 365 tenant, and Ammul's gonna be operating out of his StratSyn Consulting Microsoft 365 tenant. So not only are we sharing documents, we're sharing across organizations. So whenever we co-author, you can see each other's changes quickly, in fact, in a matter of seconds. And with certain versions of Excel, you'll see other people's selections in different colors. The versions, you can see this in are Excel for Android, Excel for iOS Excel Mobile, and of course, Excel for Microsoft 365. If you're using one of these versions, you then select Share in the upper right-hand corner of the spreadsheet, which we'll get into in a moment here. And go ahead and choose the person's email you wanna share with, and the sharing, the co-authoring features will be enabled. So let's go ahead and get this spreadsheet open here. So I'm actually on my desktop right now, and you can see I've got an Excel spreadsheet highlighted here. I'm just going to go ahead and open this on my desktop to show you some of the things that we have to do first to enable sharing. So here's the file on my desktop. If I do want to go ahead and share this with the Ammul, I can go ahead and click on Share in the upper right-hand corner here. And the first thing that's going to ask me to do is actually take this file and load it up into OneDrive 'cause right now it's just sitting on my desktop and there's no way for us to share and do the co-authoring until the file's sitting within our OneDrive or SharePoint Online. So I'm just gonna click on OneDrive here, and it is now loading a copy of this file off of my desktop, into my OneDrive. And the first things I have to do here is I have to choose who do I want to share this with? So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go down and choose Specific people, because Ammul's who I actually wanna share this document with. So I've gone and I will get his email address typed in and in a moment here. And what I wanna do is I actually want to click on this Allow editing because part of co-authoring is enabling not only Ammul to see my document, to actually be able to edit it as well. So we can work on the document the same time. So I've chosen Specific people, I'm allowing editing. If I didn't have this allow editing on it can actually block the file from being downloaded as well by clicking that toggle switch. But that's not what we wanna do because I want to actually enable the co-authoring process. So I'm going to click apply. Next thing it's going to do is ask me to put an email address in here. So I'm just gonna start typing Ammul's name in. Ammul pops up, like so, and I'm gonna get a notification here, and this is pretty important. It's just letting me know that Ammul's actually outside of my organization. So keeping in mind a moment ago, I mentioned that the, I'm actually inside Iteration Insights Microsoft 365 tenant with the Excel spreadsheet in my OneDrive. And I'm gonna share it over to Ammul inside of his StratSyn Consulting Microsoft 365 tenant. So now that I've done that, I'm gonna go ahead and click Send. And it let me know that the send has, or the file's been sent off to him, so in a couple minutes here Ammul will get an email notifying him that he can see the document. And I'm gonna show you where to go and manage the permissions, but, when he actually gets into the document, you're gonna see his initials pop up here in the right-hand corner, indicating, up, there he is already, so that happened pretty quickly. So we can see that, we can see that he has gotten into the file here, but before we start doing some collaboration work with him, let's go ahead and, let's go ahead and show you where we can view who has access to file. So once again, I clicked on Share and I'm gonna click on these three little ellipses right here and click on Manage access. And right down below this link here, I'm gonna see the here's the people that I specified can actually edit the file, and it's letting me know that Ammul's the person who has access to it, and he's an external user, so that's great. If I wanted to remove him at this point, which I don't, I could go ahead and click this X, but this is where you can go and manage some of your permissions. Now you can actually do this in your OneDrive as well, but we'll just focus on the Excel side of the equation to start with. So I'm just gonna go ahead and close this off. And we can see that Ammul's actually in the file here and I can see that he's on cell F5. So in this dialog box, it's letting me know where he's at, and I can see this blue ring around F5 right here, indicating that this is where he is actually editing the work. So what we're gonna do here is I'm going to see if Ammul can go ahead and change this data here to $10,000. But first I'm gonna actually use another feature here in Microsoft 365 to drive that collaboration, 'cause maybe we're not on the phone working together, or maybe we're actually sharing things verbally, but I'm going to go up and actually send over some comments here. I'm just gonna say, actually, let's go into this one right here, I'm just gonna say New Comment and say, "Let's change these to $10,000 for the rest of the year." Something like that. Now let's get our, like so. So I can go ahead and click that and now he is getting that comment there and he'll go ahead and edit this data here. So we're gonna see these changes here really quick. So he's gone and already made the change to the $10,000 there, and we can see that everything has been moved over as requested. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm actually gonna make some changes myself, and I see he's already replied that it's done. And I'd say, "Thanks very much." So let's just, like so, oops, shouldn't hit enter, need to hit that Send there, and here we can actually see our entire collaboration chain directly inside of this email. So I'm gonna go ahead and change my values, and here's $5,000 for the one right below it, like so. Okay. So what we're gonna do here next is let's just suppose a couple of days went by and we wanted to revert the spreadsheet back to the original values. So now I wanna go ahead and show you some other features inside of Excel, is the ability to go back and revert to other versions. So what we're gonna do here is I'm just gonna go into, go into my comment stream, and you have to kind of play the story out a little bit here. I'm just go ahead and say, you know, "Ammul, why did we go ahead and change these values? Why did we change this to $10,000," and pretend this is a couple of days later here. So we're kind of doing this example live, so I said, "Why do we change this to $10,000?" And we'll wait for Ammul to reply back in the window there. And we can maybe go about doing some other work as he's getting ready to reply to me. And oh yeah, that's right, so we did it based on the new numbers from accounting. But let's go ahead and actually, I'm gonna tell him I wanna revert these values back. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go in and let him know that I want to revert this back. So I'm just going to say, "Let's revert these values back." And what I'm gonna take advantage of is version history within Excel. So what I'm gonna do here now, is I'm going to go to the very top of my document right here, and I can click on the name, and I can actually go and take a look at the version histories that are over there. So I'm gonna click on that right here, and I can see that we've got a few different versions of this file. Now, keeping in mind that in this example here, it's only a few minutes old, but I wanna go back and take a look at what the original version actually looked like. So I'm just gonna click on that and I can go and see that, all right, well, these are what the values look like before we did anything. Now I actually want to go back and get this restored back to its original point. So what we're gonna do at this point here is I'm just going to click this Restore button. And it let me know that somebody else is working on the file, so what I'm gonna have to do here is I'm just gonna close my file out really quick here and come back and then get this restored back into the actual version itself. Okay, so I've got the file back open now. So what I'm gonna do is go back over to my Version History, click on that there. It's gonna go ahead once again and take a look through different versions. I'm gonna click on this original version here and click Restore once again. And we're gonna see now that the document has been put back to its original state. Now, keeping in mind here that I've gone back to the original state of the document as it was about 10 minutes ago. Now, keep in mind, we're trying to play out about a week's worth of activity here, but now I can go in the comments. You gonna notice the comments are all gone because as I went back to the original version of the document, the comments also went away with it. So at this point as a best practice, it might actually be a good idea to go in and actually put a comment in here that we actually reverted this back to the original version. So I'm just gonna go in here and say, "Reverted back to the original version," something along those lines there, just so we know that, "Hey, wait a minute, we thought we had made some changes to this, what happened?" So this way now the comment is actually back in the document itself. All right, one last thing that I do want to show you here inside of Microsoft 365 is this AutoSave. So in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, you're gonna notice we've got this AutoSave on. And what happens here is by default, inside of Microsoft's 365, is what will happen is the document will be saved every few seconds automatically for you versus always having to remember to go in and hit the save button. So this is a new feature. It is enabled by default when data is stored on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. And one thing to point out too is now that this document is stored within Microsoft 365, if I go to the File menu, we're gonna notice here that there is no file, save as. So the only thing we can do is save a copy, do a manual save, or let the document just continue doing its auto save on its own. If I want, I can actually go ahead and turn that off, I'm not actually gonna do the switch on it. And that forces you to go into the manual saving mode. So it's really up to you to decide what version of saving you want to do. I know myself, I tend to leave the AutoSave on for all of my Microsoft 365 documents, but everyone has their different preferences. All right, so that kinda concludes what we want to talk about here in this section on distribution and collaboration. There's some awesome things that you can do, and hopefully you were able to demo that here in this particular sub lesson with Microsoft 365, that really drive the collaboration process. It really wasn't that long ago that we did things over network drives and email, and that really made the versioning in Excel management process quite challenging. And even just some of these features inside of Microsoft 365, just demoed over the last 10 plus minutes here, are a huge time-saver, will make collaboration and distribution much easier. And so with that, this brings us to the end of this sub lesson.