Collaborate on Excel workbooks at the same time with co-authoring. Learn how to use the new simplified sharing feature in Excel. Now it's easier to share your spreadsheet with others on SharePoint, OneDrive, or OneDrive for Business.

You and your colleagues can open and work on the same Excel workbook. This is called co-authoring. When you co-author, you can see each other's changes quickly—in a matter of seconds. And with certain versions of Excel, you'll see other people's selections in different colors.

Shared Workbooks is an older feature that has been replaced by co-authoring. This article explains the older feature, but we recommend using co-authoring instead.

Share and collaborate with Excel for the web. Share your workbook with others, so you can work together on the file at the same time. For more info, see Collaborate on Excel workbooks at the same time with co-authoring. Select Share.

You can use Excel Services to share workbooks with others in a secure, central location, such as a Documents library in SharePoint Server 2013 or SharePoint Online in Office 365 Enterprise. You can do this in a few simple steps:

Collaborate on Excel workbooks at the same time with co-authoring. Learn how to use the new simplified sharing feature in Excel. Now it's easier to share your spreadsheet with others on SharePoint, OneDrive, or OneDrive for Business.

When you want others to view your Excel for the web workbook but not make any changes to it, you can share it as a read-only workbook. Select File > Share > Share with People (or select Share in the top right).

Select Share on the ribbon. Or, select File > Share. Note: If your file is not already saved to OneDrive, you'll be prompted to upload your file to OneDrive to share it. Select who you want to share with from the drop-down, or enter a name or email address. Add a message (optional) and select Send.

You can publish a workbook to a Microsoft SharePoint library so that people can view or edit it in a web browser without needing Excel installed on their computers. Publishing is essentially the same as saving, but with some built-in options that let you control what people can see when they open the workbook in a browser.

After you share your file, you can work on it with others at the same time. For the best experience, work together in Excel for the web and see real-time changes. Under Share , you'll see the names of who else is also editing the file.