Saving and Retrieving Files on Remote Computers
Sharing Workbooks on a Network
Combining Changes Made to Multiple Workbooks
Distributing Workbooks and Worksheets by E-Mail
Controlling Document Access with Information Rights Management
IN the past, if you wanted to share your worksheets with other people, you copied everything onto floppy disks, carried them down the hall (or flipped them over the partition), and handed them to the person who wanted them. This system (still effective!) was known affectionately as sneakernet. The lucky few who worked for large companies might have been connected to a network. These days, small companies and even people who work at home have networks, and everyone can take advantage of the Internet. Microsoft Excel 2010 makes it easier than ever to get connected and provides easy-to-use tools that can help foster the synergy that is the hallmark of effective collaboration.
By clicking the File tab and then clicking Save As, you can use the list at the top of the Save As dialog box to save a workbook on any available network drive, on a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, in a Web folder on the Internet, or on a Microsoft SharePoint site. The dialog box you see when you click the File tab and then click Open contains a similar list. You can use this list to retrieve workbooks saved on the network or on the Internet.
When you try to open a file that resides on a network drive while another user has the file open, Excel 2010 displays a dialog box that allows you to open the file in read-only mode. Figure 25-1 shows the File In Use dialog box that appears when you attempt to open a busy file.
If you click Notify in the File In Use dialog box, Excel opens your file in read-only mode and then alerts you when the file becomes available for read-write access by displaying the File Now Available dialog box shown in Figure 25-2.
