Spreadsheet Sharing - Excel 2016

[SinbadTheCat]

Hello
Thank you for reading and hopefully helping with this query.

BACKGROUND INFO
As part of my job I use a spreadsheet to plan workloads. It is not a large spreadsheet (445 KB) and is fairly simple, it has no formulas, macros, pivot tables or hyperlinks It is just quite heavily formatted with lines (to split up days / weeks) and different colours (to identify different jobs). There are 3 of us in the team who have permissions to modify the spreadsheet, but a further 20+ people within the department can view the document as read only. The people can be in different offices or working at home via a remote log in.

THE PROBLEM!
We (the 3 modifers) regularly get a message to say that the spreadsheet has been locked and we cannot do anything with it, sometimes it will identify a name but often won't. We then have to send an email round to the team asking them to exit the document and sometimes this clears it. If not, our IT person can go into the document and throw everyone out, we can then carry on.

If only 1 person is in the document (and it's not on share) there doesn't seem to be a problem but as soon as 2 or 3 or in it ... it's not happy!

Is excel sharing in 2016 a problem? Is there anything we can do about it?

Thanks in advance

[63falcondude]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

What you are explaining is called "co-authoring".

From my limited understanding of this, I think that you need an Office 365 subscription to do this.

More here: https://support.office.com/en-us/art...b-3024e46fb104

Take a look at Google Sheets. That may work better for what you are looking to do.

[FDibbins]

I have has similar problems, the only way around was to kick everyone out of the file.