I need to limit rights to save changes in excel through SharePoint

Question

My organization newly implemented SharePoint in our workflow. My problem is excel in SharePoint.

We use a premade excel spreadsheet for calculations for material costs. There is a set of formulas that are premade. We need our coworkers to be able to open the spreadsheet, plot in their data, but not save any changes made to the spreadsheet. I need the spreadsheet not to save any changes made by another person. Normally I would just have used an macro, but this is not possible in SharePoint as online excel is not macro-compatible.

Limit to only read is not going to work, as we need them to be able to plot in data in the sheet. We just don't want them to be able to save any changes made.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible by changing permissions.

If you grant read permissions to users, they will not to be able to plot in data in the sheet and if you grant edit permissions, they will be able to save the changes in excel file.

Answer 2

Here is a workaround you can try. Using SharePoint list with Power Automate(flow).

As the main goal is to only allow end users to plot data. You can try to create a list (Power Apps form also works. List is comparatively easier) with Power Automate to do it.

In the list, only add the rows need to be filled in by end users. Then just configure a flow associated with the list, use the data from the list item to update the excel file in a way you want. The flow triggered by SharePoint list run under the creator's permission. In other words, you can remove the edit or even read permission from the end user while still enable them to fill in data.