In the latest instalment in the exciting world of Excel – Microsoft have announced Excel Live! 

Following in the footsteps of PowerPoint Live from 2021 making which allowed for TEAMS presentations to be more immersive for all participants, Microsoft will soon be dropping a similar feature for Excel. 

Up until now sharing an Excel file in a TEAMS meeting has been one-sided. You share the file, then everyone gets to watch whilst you make changes, or has to open their own copy locally. Fun for you, but not so fun for everyone else. With the addition of Excel Live this will be a thing of the past.

By sharing a file during a meeting within TEAMS, the sharer will have the option to select “Excel Live” from the “Share” tray. This option will be populated with all your recent workbooks. Once you have selected the one you want to release into the wild you’ll be met with another prompt asking if you want to “Share with all participants”. Hit “Share” and it will then allow everyone to edit the workbook directly from the TEAMS meeting screen, live – imagine “Multi-player Excel”.

Now the meeting screen is essentially a canvas allowing everyone to make changes, follow the presenter, add to the workbook all without ever needing to leave the meeting screen or open their own copy of the file. You don’t even need to have the Excel app running on your machine.

This feature can also be utilised from the Excel web app. If you have a workbook open that you want to share in a TEAMS meeting, just click “Share”, then “Work together in TEAMS” and then you’re all set. It’s that easy. 

Microsoft 365 have also released a short video outlining this new feature below:

As you can see, this tool looks to be a massive benefit to collaborative working and we can’t wait to see the feature to be extended even further throughout the 365 suite.