This question should not have to exist. The fact that it does, that a company cannot manage access to its own file because the original owner left over a year ago, exposes a fundamental flaw in how traditional spreadsheets handle ownership and data control.
The user's scenario is painfully common. A shared Excel file lives in Teams. The person who created it retired. Leadership now wants to restrict access and eventually delete the file, because it is blocking adoption of a new system. But the file's permissions are locked to a ghost, an account that still exists in the directory but belongs to nobody. So the organization is stuck. They cannot reassign ownership. They cannot delete the file. They cannot even change who can view it. The file outlives its owner, and the company loses control of its own data.
This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a governance failure built into the tool itself. Traditional spreadsheets treat ownership as a permanent, non-transferable property. When the owner vanishes, the file becomes orphaned, still active, still shared, but effectively unmanageable. The only workarounds involve IT escalations, admin overrides, or copying the data into a new file and starting over. None of those scale. None of them feel like a solution. They feel like penalties for using the tool as intended.
What this situation really reveals is that the spreadsheet was never designed for the modern collaborative environment. It was built for a single user on a single machine. Sharing and permissions were added later, bolted on, never rethought. So when a file becomes a shared company resource, the underlying architecture cannot support it. The owner becomes a bottleneck, and when that bottleneck is a person who no longer works there, the whole system seizes up.
An AI-native spreadsheet solves this by decoupling data from any single user. Ownership becomes dynamic. Permissions are managed at the file or folder level, not tied to a person's account. If the original creator leaves, an admin can reassign ownership, adjust access, or archive the file without waiting for a ticket to be escalated. The data remains under the organization's control, not the individual's.
If you are the person in this scenario, stop searching for a workaround that does not exist. The real answer is not a permission hack or an IT override. It is a tool that treats shared data as a shared responsibility from the start. The file you are trying to lock down is a symptom. The cure is a spreadsheet that does not orphan your data when its owner walks out the door.