Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

Create a Shared Workspace

Excel calls workbooks shared through SharePoint shared workspaces or sometimes shared lists. The Excel documentation isn’t always careful about it, but there is a difference:

• Shared workspaces are entire documents stored on SharePoint.

• Shared lists are parts of documents stored on SharePoint.

How you share those two things is different, so, first-things-first, let’s talk about shared workspaces.

Note

Shared workspaces are a big improvement over shared workbooks—Excel’s earlier feature that allowed multiple users to share edits. For one thing, workspaces provide tools to manage a workbook’s users or send out notices to those users.

How to do it

Once you’ve signed up for a trial SharePoint site or installed SharePoint on your own server, you’ll have an address (also know as a URL) for your site. Write that down. My SharePoint URLs are:

//excelnotebook.sharepointsite.com

For my trial site from Apptix. This is available to me over the Web from anywhere.

//wombat1

For my local site on my local server. This is the URL I use for accessing the server from my local, home network.

//65.11.195.07 (not my real IP address for security reasons)

For my local server over the Web. This is the IP address my Internet provider assigned me, and I haven’t bothered to associate it with a domain name since I don’t expose that server to the public very often.

I can use any of those URLs to share a workbook, though //wombat1/ is the quickest since it goes ...