

Go to Tools | Share Document, and the Sharing window will open and indicate which users currently have the document open ( Figure C).įigure C Two users are working within the same document. When someone opens the document, they will get a warning informing them the spreadsheet is in sharing mode and certain “rules” apply ( Figure B).įigure B Users immediately know their document is in Sharing mode. Note: While in Sharing mode, no one can change the document’s format - only the data.įigure A You cannot manually add users - you can only enable/disable sharing here. Save the document, and now it’s ready for other users to open and edit. In the resulting window, click the checkbox for Share This Spreadsheet With Other Users ( Figure A). After you save the files, go to Tools | Share Document. xls file if you need to send it to someone who uses Microsoft Office). ods file format (later on, you can save it as an. In order to share a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet, the document must be open and saved in the. Sharing your LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets

Then, I introduce you to the LibreOffice Merge tool that allows you to merge two working copies of a spreadsheet into one. In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to share your LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets. So you can create a spreadsheet, save it to a network drive, share the spreadsheet, and anyone with access to that drive can work with the document. This collaboration feature also works over a network. The only way to gain access to those elements again is to unshare the document. These feature locks also apply to the document creator. When a document is shared, formatting and chart/drawing editing attributes are locked so other users cannot alter the spreadsheet’s design - they can alter data, just not the design. The collaboration works seamlessly (across platforms even) when using the open document format. There has been an uptick in these questions since the release of Microsoft Office 2013.Ī user recently asked me, “Does LibreOffice offer the ability to collaborate with spreadsheets?” The short answer is “yes,” and the long answer is “yes, with a caveat.” The caveat is the collaboration doesn’t work well when using the Microsoft native formats. I get a lot of questions from small business users about migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. The ability to easily share spreadsheets in LibreOffice has helped bring the office suite that much closer to being a worthy replacement for Microsoft Office.

Merge or share your LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets
