Essays, case studies and working notes on one question: how should a team work together on numbers that live in Excel? New posts as we have something worth saying — not on a schedule.
How to share an Excel file with multiple users.
Co-authoring, the legacy Shared Workbook, email — how to set each up, where each breaks, and a fourth option.
How to merge Excel files into one.
Move or Copy, Power Query, VBA — and the question to ask before picking one: once, or every week?
Excel as a database: what works, what breaks.
Where Excel stops being enough, what people replace it with, and how to put a database behind it instead.
Excel version history: what it captures, what it misses.
Where to find it, what it records, and why 'who changed this and why' has no answer.
Five ways shared Excel breaks down — and what each one costs.
Live keystrokes, whole-workbook sharing, keystroke-level history, no way to combine, no way to compare. None of it is user error.
Symphony compared: co-authoring, Sheets, Airtable, Monday, ClickUp.
What each tool actually is, who it's for, and the one decision that matters most: stay in Excel, or leave.
Why real-time co-authoring is the wrong model for spreadsheets.
Most teams turn it off within a week of turning it on. There's a reason — and it's not what you think.
How a sales team and management worked together to meet their numbers.
Private worksheets, weekly Submits, and a forecast everyone could finally trust.
The six shapes of a team conversation.
Star, Gateway, Adhoc, Round-Robin, Broadcast, Time & Space Priority — and how to recognise yours.
About the author
Dharmesh Dadbhawala leads Symphony at Boardwalktech Inc. in Palo Alto, California. He writes about collaboration, spreadsheets, and the gap between how teams are supposed to work and how they actually do. Reach him at [email protected].