If you listened to me and installed dropbox, kudos! I hope you love it as much as I do.
I just started using the software to collaborate on files, and found that it behaves very funny. In particular, when you open an excel (or other MS Office file), Dropbox does not sync the file to the server until after you close it. Furthermore, if a person opens an excel file, even if they make no changes, dropbox will mark the file as changed and potentially create a conflict.
The solution, according to this forum post is to mark your spreadsheets as collaboration. As a result, excel doesn’t lock the files, so saves will be synced automatically, and changes will be merged across files. (And presumably, changes will also be updated as you work on them, but I’m not sure how that works).
I haven’t tried this yet, but I will follow up in a few days once I have had a chance to look at it. I can see that dropbox may still get confused as two people are editing the same file (particularly macros, which don’t like to change once you have opened a file), but I think MS has probably conquered this problem by now.
May 31, 2009
The “share” feature makes excel behave differently, and you can’t edit VBA in that mode. It’s a so-so solution. Better would be if dropbox understood the lock file method Office uses.