Search this and you get forum threads from 2016 telling you to switch on a feature Microsoft has since hidden. The advice keeps missing because three completely different things all get called “sharing a spreadsheet”, and they fail in three different ways. Here is which one you are actually in.
An .xlsx sitting on a shared drive or an old file server is a single file with a single lock. The second person to open it gets read-only, or an offer to be told when it is free. Nobody is overwriting anybody yet — what usually happens next is that someone takes a copy just to get on with the day, and the overwrite arrives later, when the copies are reconciled by hand. If your team emails versions around, this is the case you are in, and no Excel setting fixes it, because the problem is that there are now several files.
Most of the older advice tells you to switch on Shared Workbooks. Microsoft calls it “an older feature”, says that “the Share Workbook button has been hidden”, and states that it “has been replaced by co-authoring”. You can still dig it out of the ribbon settings, and people do — which is the trap, because it works just well enough to keep. Microsoft’s own page lists what you give up: in a shared workbook you cannot create or insert tables, change conditional formatting, delete worksheets, create charts or PivotTables, use macros, or use threaded comments, and it cannot be edited in Excel for the web at all.
So the classic sequence runs: someone switches it on to stop the overwriting, someone else later cannot insert a table and never finds out why, and the workbook quietly becomes the file nobody is allowed to improve.
Co-authoring is the modern answer and it genuinely works, but Microsoft’s requirements are stricter than most teams realise:
That last point explains the symptom that otherwise makes no sense — it worked yesterday, and today the whole team is locked out. Microsoft: “The most common one is because someone has opened the file with a version of Excel that doesn’t support co-authoring. If just one person does this, then everyone else will get the ‘locked’ error.”
One straggler on an old build locks everybody, and nothing on screen tells you who it was.
Everything above assumes several people are editing one document. Often that is not what is happening. The tell is simple: if two people are almost never in the same cell, and what they are each doing is maintaining their own rows — their clients, their jobs, their stock — then nobody wanted a shared document. They wanted a shared set of records, and a document is the wrong shape for that.
The difference is worth naming, because it is why the overwriting keeps coming back after each fix. A cell has no owner, no type and no history. A record has all three. Priya editing her own job is not a conflict with Tom editing his — but inside one file it is, forever, no matter where you store the file.
We build Bionic Forms and we would like teams who have outgrown a shared spreadsheet to consider it, so this is not neutral. What we can offer instead of neutrality is that every limitation above is Microsoft’s own documentation rather than our characterisation, and that we will say plainly where we help and where we do not.
Where we help: the same information, but as records. Two people editing different rows never collide. Every record keeps its own history, so “who changed this, and to what” is a question with an answer. Permissions are per person rather than per file, and people outside your team can fill in a form without an account at all — which is usually why the spreadsheet was being emailed around in the first place.
Where we do not: if what you have really is a model — formulas, scenarios, a financial sheet several people reason about together — then you want a spreadsheet, you want co-authoring, and the list above is your fix. We do not run spreadsheet formulas, and we would rather say that here than after you moved. We also do not read an .xlsx yet: today we take a shared Google Sheet link or a CSV export, so an Excel file needs a Save As first.
Sourcing, plainly: every quotation comes from Microsoft’s own Office support documentation — collaborate on Excel workbooks at the same time with co-authoring and about the shared workbook feature — checked on 21 August 2026. Where we describe what happens on a plain network share, we are describing ordinary file locking rather than quoting a document, and we say so rather than dressing it up as a citation.
Being straight about where we are: Bionic Forms is pre-launch. There is no Windows desktop app yet and no iOS or Android app; the macOS and Linux desktop builds and the web app are what exist today, and we have no external customers to point at.
If you would rather not rebuild it yourself: tell us what the spreadsheet does and we will build a working version and show you. No fee and no card — what we build fits the free plan, and we ask you to pay only once it is genuinely running your business.