Using Web Discussions

Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003 include a collaborative feature that allows you and others in your office to easily develop workbooks together, over the network. This is done using the Web Discussions feature. This feature, which is not available in Excel 2007, allows you and your colleagues to insert remarks into the same workbook and to participate in an active online discussion.

In order for the Web Discussions feature to work, everyone needs to be using a version of Excel that supports the feature, and you need to be connected to a network on which a copy of the Microsoft Office Server Extensions are available. These are add-on programs for the Internet Information Server, which is also available from Microsoft. If you have doubts whether the extensions are available on your network, you should talk to your network administrator.

When you are using the Web Discussion feature, Excel allows you and your co-workers to view the same workbook on-screen. Each of you can then make written remarks about the workbook. The remarks can then be immediately viewed by others, and they can respond. The responses are threaded, which simply means that you can easily follow the course of a discussion through several layers of comments.