How can I share a "view only" excel file with function controls?

Question

Our team shares a lot of excel files. Some of those are what we call "Status files" (...sort of a "Where are you at with that monthly/quarterly/annual process"). Many of those files have function controls. We recently decided to start utilizing Microsoft Teams. It was extremely disappointing to see that function controls do not work in Teams.

That being said, I understand that Teams uses the free version of excel, I understand why, and I understand that we "could" rebuild our sheets that use function controls, but I'm not personally interested in doing that. Does anyone have a workaround or are we stuck emailing sheets to each other whenever needed?

Answer 1

Hi @Travis Catalano

To better help you, I want to confirm that do these shared files with function controls work successfully in Excel desktop app?

Have you tried to use OneDrive for Business or SharePoint to share these Excel files and set "view only"?

If these function controls don't work on Excel online, you can try to let users open these files using the Excel client as default. For more about such settings, please refer to following thread.

How to put Office Excel to open a file in SharePoint

Besides, if one people in the team shares files useing an organization account to others in the same tenant, recipients can find these shared files directly in their OneDrive for Business online > Shared > Shared with you.

But if you still want to use Teams to share files, it's better to open a new thread on Q&A forum with tag "Microsoft Teams".

In addition, if these shared Excel files can not work successfully because of "view only" permission, I am afraid you need to give more permission to shared users.

Thanks for your understanding.

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