Workbook Collaboration Using Sheet View
Collaborating in an Excel workbook can be a disruptive experience.
You’re working in the same worksheet as a colleague — they filter a table and suddenly it shrinks — interrupting the state you had it in and derailing your progress.
Sometimes this behaviour is desirable, but if you’re working individually, you probably don’t want the actions of others to interfere with yours.
Sheet View is a feature that lets you create customised views of a worksheet whilst maintaining the original state. You can create up to 256 views and they are visible to everyone who has access to the workbook.
Sheet View only works for files stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. It doesn’t work for local copies so the ribbon group will be greyed out.
Steps
- Activate the worksheet you want to create a sheet view in.
- Go to View (tab) > Sheet View (group) > New (button). The row and column headings will invert.
- Apply a filter and/or a sort to the table.
- The dropdown will change from ‘Default’ to ‘Temporary View’. Type a custom name and press Return. The sheet view name now appears in the dropdown.
- Click Exit to return to the original state.
Example
A sheet view is created for the customer table. First, the county column is filtered to only include entries that are equal to ‘Greater London’. Then the last_name column is sorted in ascending order. The sheet view is saved as ‘Customers from Greater London’.