If you are the only editor of a gSheet, it is easy to control any changes, or restore to a previous version in case something goes wrong. What happens, though, when multiple users are updating the spreadsheet at the same time? What if most of them are not advance or experienced ones, focusing on simple tasks such as data entry? How easy is it to prevent a collision of changes?
Let’s give an example here. Imagine that there is a Spreadsheet which stores the data of each new order that comes in from an e-shop. Multiple users are updating the state of each order and every time an order is updated, some kind of sorting is applied to the whole spreadsheet.
A problem might occur when one user is submitting a change while another one is still editing a cell. All orders-rows will be sorted based on the new submission and the other user, that is still editing, might end up changing a different order-row from the one he originally did.
The worse part of that scenario is that it might become difficult to realise a mistake has occurred until is too late.
So what’s the solution on this one?
Go offline.
Yes, it’s that easy. Just go offline before editing the spreadsheet and go back online afterward to upload the changes.
While disconnecting and reconnecting to the internet might not be so practical, I would suggest using a browser add-on to temporally disable internet access to the browser.
So the steps are the following.
1) Turn on offline access to your spreadsheets
2) Install add-on that will turn off internet access to the browser.
I suggest using a different browser apart from the one you are currently using so you won’t have to go offline on all your tasks every time.
And I am sure you will find multiple others with the same capabilities.
So, every time you need to make a change to a spreadsheet like that, just go offline, make your changes and then go back online.
That’s a fast workaround in case there are multiple users editing a Google Spreadsheet at the same time.
Keep in mind that going offline could be useful only in case the users are editing pre-existing rows and a resorting process, of the rows, is executed after each edit.
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