Is default open mode for ExCel (Office 365) configurable?

Question

I googled around and found no answer for what I think should be an obvious question/problem, so I'll ask here.

I have an ExCel spreadsheet that I want to share with a couple other guys. Version, as far as I can tell, is "Office 365 ProPlus" (sorry if that's wrong, I'm a linux guy). I do the vast majority of the writing/editing, the other guys mostly just read it. I put it on a shared drive. But when they open it, it opens in edit mode and I'm locked out because one of the other guys (who just wanted to read it) opened it and the default open mode is edit.

I want to change the default open mode to be read_only. If I want to open for edit, I don't mind clicking a few times to get to that point. But what I can't have is being locked out because the read_only guys have it locked. If they have it locked because they're making changes, that's fine. But for the 95% of the time, where I write and they read, I don't want them to unintentionally lock the thing when all they want to do is read.

Is this sort of thing possible ? Can I configure this ?

Answer 1

You may save your document as "Read-only recommended" and get your friends to open it read-only whenever they do not need to edit the document:

For the new versions (2013 & 2016), while Saving or Saving As your file press Browse button, go to Tools | General Options and select the Read-only recommended check box. If you want you may enter a password too. After this, the users will be recommended to open the document as read only; if they want, they may still open the file in edit mode.

In addition you may use the shared workbook feature of Excel which allows multi users to edit the document at the same time. And using this way you may track which changes are made when and by whom too.This feature can be activated using Review / Share Workbook button. If you have a newer version of Excel, this button is hidden, you may unhide it using the instructions here: unhide shared workbook

Answer 2

Old post but I just had the same question and landed here. I was also suspecting the Office version but it turns out that's not it. I figured it out that instead of going to the File-Properties you have to go to the "Save As..." dialog box, and there, next to the Save / Cancel buttons, is the Tools... dialog where you can set a "Read-only recommended" check mark. I think the implication is that it's not a document property, it's a windows file property - that's why it's not in the File-Options menu. After I found it, I remembered that this is how I always used to do it in old versions of Excel many years ago, so it's really unchanged.