Many of you will have noticed that the Excel “share workbook” command is now missing in later versions. In this video and article, we will show you how to recover the Excel share workbook command.

Many of our customers use our great DataPoint add-on for PowerPoint to show real-time information screens with announcements, calendar information, safety instructions and KPIs in factories.

Normally you would expect a database to store this information, but we have noticed that a majority of our users are using a Microsoft Excel worksheet. Excel worksheets are great and easy for this because Excel is easy to use and it offers more flexibility to make quick changes than other database formats.

We often see that a single person’s file is shared with colleagues to view and edit information but then you need multi-user access on a single Excel file and you quickly run into the limitations of an Excel file which is basically not intended for multiple users.

With older Excel versions you had a share workbook option at the review tab but since Excel 2016 this button has been removed.

There is an option, an easy option in Excel 2016 to bring this Excel share workbook command back to life so that you can share your Excel file with multiple users and work together on the same data sheet.

Let me show you how.  So normally in Excel older versions, you would go to the review tab and you would have a share workbook option here while you still see an unshared workbook. This has been removed by Microsoft in the Excel 2016 version, so let me show you how you how you can bring this back.

Click File, then Options then here at the customize ribbon option you go to the review tab and then here at the commands list you choose to display All Commands and use look down for the share workbook command.

Here it is “Share Workbook (Legacy). Now you click on add to bring this over to the review tab but you will get an error message because you have to create a custom group. So let me create first of all a custom group. Click new group I am renaming this sharing like this so now I have sharing as a group selected here I go back here to share workbook and I click the Add button and now you have this option in our newly created custom group.

So click OK now you have this new button here click on it and you can share the information with multiple users when you click OK and you save the workbook then all the users can now open this excel file and you can work together on this file.