How a shared FreeCRiM workbook stays consistent with more than one person in it

A CRM only a database can see has one obvious advantage over a spreadsheet: it decides, centrally, what a save actually means when two people are editing at once. A workbook-first CRM has to earn that the honest way, because the file genuinely can be opened by more than one person.

What Excel already gives you

Microsoft's own co-authoring lets everyone with access open the same file in Excel or Excel for the web and see each other's changes, cell by cell, in something close to real time - the same feature that already works for any shared OneDrive or SharePoint spreadsheet, FreeCRiM or not. It is genuinely useful for looking at the workbook together, and nothing about connecting it to FreeCRiM changes it.

What FreeCRiM adds on top

Excel's co-authoring resolves simultaneous typing. It does not resolve two systems - your typing, and an app's automated write - landing on the same cell at once, which is a different problem with a different fix. FreeCRiM's fix is to never write through two connections into one workbook at the same time: one team member is elected the workbook's writer, and every change any member makes in the app - yours included - is queued and applied through that single connection, in order.

You do not choose the writer, and you rarely need to know who it is. It is simply whichever member's Microsoft 365 connection is healthy when the workbook needs writing to, and FreeCRiM re-elects automatically if that connection ever stops working, so the team's changes are never blocked on one person's account staying connected forever.

What this means day to day

Editing the workbook directly in Excel still works exactly as it always has, co-authoring included - that is between you and Microsoft. Working through the FreeCRiM app is what the elected-writer design protects: however many teammates are using it, and however many changes they make, the workbook only ever receives one write at a time.