I Cant Edit My Excel Spreadsheet

How do I grant only specific people to be able to open, view, edit an excel file? I don't want anybody else besides these two people to be able to even open the file, so I'm not talking about password protecting to prohibit editing a file. I would assume I need to go to the properties, security settings but I'm not sure?

We have an Excel spreadsheet that sits on the network.
People need to open the file to be able to sign up for various duty rosters.
We would like for the file to open for the first person.
And then for any others after that, get a message that the file is in use
WITHOUT the option to open a read-only copy.
Our staff can't read and they keep opening additional copies of the file!
I have read about sharing the file and I don't think that would make things
any better.
Thanks,
Lynn

I need help desparately. Last night I spent several hours working on an
Excel 2002 spreadsheet and it has disappeared.

I saved it routinely as I was making many changes updates etc. I opened
original file --stuff.xls --- made changes and saved it as again as
stuff.xls. I have done this several times before.

Today, when I go to open stuff.xls, it is nowhere to be found!!!!! I have
done a search, for any file modified since Thurs and nothing has appeared. I
have checked the recycle bin, this did not go into auto recover nothing of
the like. I am just traumatized, because I have NEVER had anything like this
happen before.

I even thought perhaps I didn't save it as often as I thought, (I know that
I did) but I remembered that I saved it at least once and I can't even find
an Excel file that has been modified since Thurs!!!

Does anyone have any idea what could have happened to this file?? BTW, I
have prayed, rebooted, run spybot, called witch doctor, all with no success.

I have never had a file to just disappear with no trace. Any help would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance---

I have a file that became too big due to phantom bloat, unused range saved by Excel and all that kind of reasons. Thank to previous posts on that board tackling that issue, I was able to find how to proceed to reduce the file back to its normal size.
But I did so in a beta file (test file). The real file has become so big (103MB!) that Excel cannot even open it anymore! The file contains archive info that we do not have anywhere else.
Is there anyway then to open the file or to reduce its size without opening it (through magics...)? I just honestly don't know how to retrieve that info before deleting that file.

Thank you very much for your help.

I know this question has been asked a bajillion times, so I apologize for the redundancy.

I am working with an Excel spreadsheet and saving it as a .csv file in order to upload to an application that parses out the .csv data as transactions. The system requires .csv files, so this is how I need to save my doc (with this extension). I have been successful at preventing Excel from coverting that long number into scientific format. I have saved as a TXT file, pasted the longer number and it displays correctly. That is all good. But I have to save as a .csv. So if I do that, close the Excel window, and then open again (as the .csv file), the numbers are back to being displayed in scientific format. I have tried creating an Excel doc from scratch and entering text in Text format, to see if this created a cleaner file. But again, the second I save as .csv, close the window and then open that file up again, that dang scientific format is back.

Does anyone have any idea of how to work around this? Once I have successfully gotten the numbers to display as the long-chain number, how can I get them to "stick" so that they don't revert back to scientific format when I reopen the file?

Thanks so much for your help!