Working Side-by-Side

For many of us in the technology industry, our style of work seems completely normal until one visits a client. The ability to reach out over Teams in real-time, and edit documents together collaboratively, without the ancient massive email attachment chains of yore, has lowered the amount of "make work" to a small level. Combined with automation tools like the Power Platform and the new Microsoft Loop app - and one might be forgiven if one believed old dusty documents had been destined for the trash bin.

And yet, traditional documents refuse to die.

Each day, millions upon millions of folk use what are now known as the "Microsoft 365 Apps" instead of "Office" to edit Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks. As real-time collaboration has taken over for many information workers - all three of these documents continue to be shared and edited, often right up until the minutes before they are consumed by stakeholders.

And that's the final frontier: being able to present and share these documents to stakeholders in the best way possible. With PowerPoint Live, Microsoft introduced the capability in Teams to allow a single person to upload a deck to a meeting. Thus, if connectivity became a challenge, or a new presenter needed to walk through the presentation, the handoff was trivial. For folks who live and die in PowerPoint each day, PowerPoint Live was a huge win - it made almost all of the pain points of presenting disappear. All but one.

The one frustration that remained was tiny: if a quick change was needed to the deck (e.g. to fix a spelling mistake), one had to stop sharing, change the underlying deck, then re-upload it to present. Not a huge deal, of course, but something that today makes PowerPoint Live feel like a solution that is 98% magic, instead of 100%. This is, of course, by design, because PowerPoint Live was intended to solve problems that came up while presenting rather than real-time collaboration.

And with that, Microsoft just introduced a similar function for Excel users - Excel Live.

It is 100% magic.

Instead of uploading a copy, the actual excel sheet is shared in real time with all contributors. That means folks can continue to edit the document while it is being presented, all without showing the presenters underlying screen. Lose connectivity? No worries - the Excel spreadsheet will continue to be shared with all parties.

Best of all, Excel Live supports sheet views, so different folks can go in and filter to their hearts' content while the meeting is taking place. And simply by adding folks into the meeting, you are provisioning access to the underlying document, so you don't have to worry about sending a substantial number of sharing invitations to allow access to the underlying spreadsheet.

Because Excel Live has been simply added into Teams, the roll-out will be subtle enough that many folks may not even be aware when it is available. Thus the biggest challenge with Excel Live is simply educating folks that it exists, and to use it for meetings.

To solve that problem, it is worth taking a few minutes, prior to a meeting with your close team, to explain to them the entire "Share content" pane. I have been on multiple calls with clients where folks have asked "how do I present the way you are?" Whether it is sharing a collaborative Whiteboard, changing the presenter mode, or having your PowerPoint decks / Excel spreadsheets uploaded - folks are going to be more familiar with the old "share window" functionality. But once you've showed them why sharing a window (or worse, your entire screen!) is less effective than sharing the direct document, most folks won't go back to the old ways of doing things.

As tools such as PowerBI become more widely used - I anticipate, hopefully, that Excel usage will decrease - but at most organizations today, including Microsoft itself - that day is far off. Until then - Excel Live makes the collaboration experience truly modern.