Microsoft integrates Excel into Teams, accelerating collaboration around spreadsheets and data.
One of the more interesting technologies being rolled out by Microsoft is a new platform for building collaborative apps, the Fluid Framework. It enables users to collaborate on documents in real time, using document containers to embed collaborative content and applications in web pages and web views. After a few years of development and a handful of trial apps, we are now seeing it ship in several Office products.
Fluid Framework powers the Loop components that appear in Outlook, as well as the Live Share application tools in Teams. It’s a way for applications to share status and manage updates as they come in, so there’s a common view of a document being updated when changes are made and without having to implement complex locking to avoid issues. Because it is built around web technologies, Fluid is intended for hosted browser content or apps that run in the browser.
Embed and work in Teams
If you have one Microsoft 365 subscription you can get an idea of how Fluid works by using the Loop components in Outlook on the web, which can be edited by anyone who receives an email with it embedded in the message. However, where Fluid really shines is within Teams, from a meeting and chat place to a collaboration host, sharing applications and opinions with colleagues and allowing them to interact with your content. Because Teams is built on web technologies, Fluid is easily built-in and can be used in many different applications.
The first embedded Teams Office application was PowerPoint Live, a way of presenting that allows for more interaction. It’s still a one-to-many tool, though, with improvements in how you can move from presenter to presenter and add a live response-based chat alongside the presentation for dynamic feedback. Accessible via the Share a meeting dropdown, it’s easy to use and much more effective than alternating screen sharing.
Microsoft takes that concept one step further announcing Excel Live in Satya Nadella’s keynote at the Inspire 2022 event. It’s a feature that seems to be changing how we work in teams and how we use documents in meetings.
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Using Excel Live
Until now, the best way to collaborate around Excel spreadsheets has been to save the file to OneDrive, open it on each employee’s desktop, with the lead sharing their screen through Teams. Changes were made slowly and it was very easy for conflicts to arise, requiring the leader to roll back changes and guide the team in creating agreed solutions. For productivity software, it wasn’t very productive.
Excel Live wants to change that, such as PowerPoint Live, by building Excel into the Teams environment and using Fluid to connect each user’s instance of the sheet. While there is a hefty software infrastructure under the hood, it is very easy for users to use.
When you’re in a meeting and want to share a spreadsheet for editing, editing formulas, or entering preliminary numbers, you can quickly open an Excel workbook using the same Share tool as PowerPoint Live. Scroll down and you’ll be presented with a list of recent workbooks, ready to share. Open the one you want to use and you’ll be prompted to share it with your meeting. This will open the workbook in the Teams meeting, with everyone’s video still visible and the shared spreadsheet visible to everyone.
Since Excel Live is rendered using the same technology that Excel Online runs on, users don’t need to have a copy, so as long as you can run Teams, you can edit a spreadsheet. Handy if you use Excel on the web, you can use it to start an Excel Live session from a spreadsheet, by choosing Collaborate in Teams from Excel’s Share menu. This will open a Teams meeting where you can invite participants with the spreadsheet open and ready for editing.
That’s a handy feature that builds on the ad hoc collaboration features in Teams. You may not always have an agenda or plan for a meeting, only to find that the numbers you need are not up to date or you need a subject matter expert to design a new set of calculations and do your work want to pass them.
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When can you use Excel Live?
Excel Live will launch in preview at the end of August 2022 and users should ensure that their Teams tenants are enrolled in the preview program. Set a policy in the Teams admin center to track users’ Office Preview settings or enable access to Teams previews for each user. Users who have signed up for the Office Preview program will automatically have access to Excel Live when it launches once they set up Teams to support previews, while other users must request access to previews in their Teams app settings.
It’s not clear when Excel Live will be generally available, but the preview should help users prepare for how it can help teams collaborate on documents. It’s a good idea to start with a small trial, expanding access to the preview as people learn how it can help organizations and how it works across a mix of business and consumer networks.
As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in his Inspire keynote, “We have to be good at syncing, asynchronous collaboration, face-to-face collaboration, and remote collaboration. In an earlier era, you could get away with one or two of these quadrants, but now we must have excellent all four quadrants at all times for work to be done and collaboration to take place.It is clear from both the Build announcements and these new features that Microsoft sees it as a place to host more than snippets of work powered by bots Excel Live lets you collaborate on spreadsheets in a way not supported in the desktop app, supporting both office meetings with large screens and home workers on their laptops.
Nadella’s conclusion from his keynote summarizes what the launch of Excel Live means for businesses and users. “If Teams is where we work, we want to be able to access everything there in the workflow, and give back our most scarce resource, our time.”
