Why cant multiple people edit an Excel workbook

Question

We have SharePoint 2013 Enterprise.

Documents are set to open in client application and NOT the Browser We want to be able to within a SharePoint 2013 library select "Edit in Excel" and have multiple people edit the document. I was told for various reasons multiple people editing an Excel document from SharePoint is limited, but this can be achieved by selecting "Share Workbook" and "Allow Changes by More than One User at the same time"

When we attempt to have multiple user open and edit the workbook it says the first person who opened the Workbook has the Workbook locked.

Any suggestions

Answer 1

I am not sure about the workaround you have but in sharepoint 2013 on Prem you can achieve this by using a feature call**Co-Authoring **.

co-authoring feature in SharePoint Server 2013 or SharePoint Online to enable multiple users to work on a document, at any time, without interfering with each other's changes.

For this feature you need office web apps along with sharepoint.

Read the overview of this

Answer 2

Excel co-authoring is not available from the Excel client application and SharePoint 2013 (see for instance https://en.share-gate.com/blog/co-authoring-documents-sharepoint-2013).

However, it was made available in 2017 for SharePoint Online (see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2017/08/31/new-to-office-365-in-august-enriching-teamwork/?eu=true).