One clerk opens the billing workbook. The second clerk gets a cold message: locked for editing, open read-only or wait to be notified. Nothing is broken and nobody did anything wrong. This page explains the lock, the invisible file that holds it, and how to work with it instead of against it.
A normal Excel file on a shared folder follows an old, strict rule of Windows networking: the first person to open it owns it, and everyone after them is a spectator until it closes. That is not a bug or a permissions mistake — it is how the SMB file-sharing protocol protects a file from two programs writing over each other at the same time. Understanding the lock takes five minutes and ends years of office confusion, because every part of the behaviour — the dialog, the ghost locks after a crash, the mysterious 'another user' — follows from this one design.
This is the real wording of the classic Excel lock dialog. On an ordinary workbook these three buttons are the whole menu — simultaneous editing is simply not on it.
When Excel opens a file from a network share, the host PC records an exclusive lock for that session. Excel itself also drops a small hidden owner file in the same folder — for a file called Sales.xlsx the lock file is named ~$Sales.xlsx — which is how the next PC learns who holds it.
There is no setting that makes a normal workbook multi-writer. You choose between waiting, viewing, or changing the file's whole mode of working.
Sometimes the dialog blames a user who swears the file is closed, or names 'another user' with no name at all. Usually the owner's Excel or PC crashed and the lock was never released cleanly.
compmgmt.msc, go to Shared Folders → Open Files, find the workbook and close that open file entry~$ owner file in the folder can be deleted — deleting it while someone genuinely has the file open invites corruptionTwo different refusals get confused daily. A lock says someone is in the file. A permissions error says you are not allowed — 'Access denied' or a plain read-only open with no dialog. Permissions are fixed on the share and folder security settings for that user account; locks are fixed by closing files or changing how the team shares. Diagnosing which of the two you are facing takes one look at the message and saves an hour of checking the wrong thing.
The video shows the shared mode switched on, after which the locked-for-editing wall simply stops appearing for the team.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYour own earlier session still holds it — usually an Excel window left open on another screen, or a crashed Excel process still running. Check for other Excel windows, look in Task Manager for a leftover EXCEL.EXE process and end only that process, then try again. On a share, the host's Open Files list in Computer Management shows the truth.
Not while the first session holds the editing lock, even if that person never types a word. Excel does not downgrade an open file to viewing automatically. The practical fixes are for the first user to close it, or to open genuinely read-only files through the Open dialog's arrow menu, which offers Open Read-Only explicitly.
For the cloud services, co-authoring replaces locking when everyone edits through the web or a modern signed-in Excel — but copies synced to local folders and opened as plain files can still collide, which is why sync tools produce conflicted copies instead. On a plain office network share with desktop Excel, locking remains the rule until the file is put into shared workbook mode.