Sharing Excel rows with different people. Is it really that easy?

Do you sometimes wonder how to share a Microsoft Excel file with different people without letting everyone see all the data? Maybe each row in your Excel file contains sensitive information, and you want each person to see only the rows that concern them.

Imagine you're a teacher recording student grades in Excel, with the students' grades listed in a column. You don’t want each student to see the grades of others, so you need to share your Excel file in a way that allows each student to view only their own grade (their own row). In this scenario, each row must correspond to a single student.

This article offers two solutions:

1. Excel’s ability (or limitations) in showing different rows to different users.
2. How RowShare excels at this task.

Manage row-level access in Excel

Unfortunately, the only way to do in Excel is by having several workbooks, one for each user.

In this case, one master where you record all the information. You are the only person having the access to that workbook.

Every time you need to share some information to different people, copy certain rows corresponding to that certain person, and paste it in a new file. Share that new workbook instead of the master that has all information in it. So, at the end you will have several files, one for each person. To share your workbooks, you can either use email, or the cloud. If you decide to use the cloud, it means that you have to save those files separately and share a different link with each person. Note that, if you expect these users to add information to their copies of your file, once they return it to you, you’ll have to copy/paste it the other way to consolidate everything in your master file.

It's worth noting that Excel does offer the option to hide rows. That way, the rows containing sensitive information will be hidden from the spreadsheet. Just follow these steps to do it:

• Select the rows you wish to hide
• Right click and select hide

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But anyone can unhide the rows unless you lock the file with a password. And this doesn't give any option to show different rows to different people, only to hide some rows to everyone.

You nailed it: Excel is no designed for collaboration over sensitive information!

An alternative designed for confidential content

RowShare was actually designed specifically with this need in mind: creating tables where everyone will not see the same rows.

RowShare allows you to take control over the rows and columns you share. You can have different settings for different people or groups of people.

Above your RowShare table, click on “Share” to define your table sharing settings when people access your table. Then, decide what rows your users will be able to access in your table:

1. Their rows only: Can only view the rows they create or that someone else assigns to them
2. All rows: Can view all the table

Here's a short overview:

RowShare tables are stored in the cloud. So, whoever accesses it sees the same version of any RowShare table anytime and anywhere. If you hide any rows or columns, they will instantly become inaccessible to anyone visiting the table. As the table owner, you devide who can see which rows and columns.

Tip: If you already have all your work done in Excel, or if you want to continue to benefit from Excel analytics features, RowShare imports and syncs Excel files!

By the way, RowShare is also great at controling who can access which columns!

Going Further

‍This is just a glimpse of what RowShare can do. You can assign specific permissions to individuals or groups, either on all rows or just some of them. For example, you can allow editing but not deletion. For more information, click here.