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Share a workbook

You can share an Astrato workbook with anyone — including people who don't have an Astrato login. They see the figures from your last refresh, and the file stays secure because your credentials never travel with it.

You can share an Astrato workbook with anyone — including people who don’t have an Astrato login. They see the figures from your last refresh, and the file stays secure because your credentials never travel with it.

Sharing a workbook from Excel's Share menu
The Excel share dialog
Link sharing settings for the workbook

What’s in the file (and what isn’t)

Travels with the workbook:

  • Your datasets — the queries you built.

  • The cached data — the numbers from your last refresh.

Never in the workbook:

  • Your credentials — your sign-in and token stay in your Office settings. Sharing a file never shares your access.

What the recipient sees

Open a shared workbook and the ASTRATO.* formulas show your last refreshed numbers straight away — no login needed. Drop =ASTRATO.LASTUPDATED(...) somewhere and they can even see how fresh those numbers are.

A shared workbook showing cached Astrato figures

If they want to refresh it themselves

To read cached data, recipients need to install nothing. To refresh, they need their own account:

  1. They sign in with their own connection (see Connect to Astrato).

  2. Refresh then runs on their access — everyone sees data according to their own permissions.

Note: If a recipient doesn’t have a connection with the same name as yours, Astrato uses their first one. If that can’t reach the workbook’s data, refresh stops and the file keeps showing your cached numbers.

Prevent a shared workbook from refreshing

Want recipients to see your figures without refreshing at all? Set the dataset’s refresh mode to Refresh manual before sharing. The workbook then shows cached data only.

Refresh modes are explained in Create and manage datasets.

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