Sharepoint and Excel Services - Restrict Access by Tab

Question

Hello,

I was wondering if it was possible to have an excel workbook on SP 2010 and make it so that different people would be able to edit different tabs of the workbook - but not the other tabs? I'm pretty new to Sharepoint and am trying to get up to speed, but in my searching I haven't found a way to do this yet. I'm not sure if it's even possible. It would greatly aid our work to have one spreadsheet where different people edit different tabs and we have one central administrator over the whole document.

Any help is appreciated - thanks and have a great day!

Answer 1

I presume you're looking at using the Excel Web Access web part in SharePoint to provide access to the workbook.

Firstly, the purpose of the Excel Web Access web part is to provide a read-only view of the spreadsheet. Users can edit the data using the "Open in Excel" button, which of course will then provide access to all the tabs (worksheets). There's no way to define different access groups for each worksheet tab in Excel, and SharePoint is simply surfacing the published Excel workbook.

You could use separate Excel Web Access web parts to display different worksheet tabs based on Named Items that you define in the workbook. These web parts could then be filtered to each user group using the Audiences feature.

If you only want selected users to have the ability to view the data in other worksheets, then you'll want to edit the toolbar menu for the web part, otherwise all users will be able to download the Excel document from the web part and view all worksheets anyway.

Of course, users will also be able to browse to the document library which stores the workbook and download a copy from there, so if protecting sensitive worksheets is vital, then the best option is to use Excel to password protect certain worksheets for privileged user groups.