Sheet Views in Excel for the web are supposed to solve exactly the problem this team is facing: multiple people sorting the same spreadsheet without stepping on each other's work. But as this user's experience shows, the feature simply does not function as advertised in practice. The official guidance looks correct on paper, open from OneDrive, select a named view, apply sorts after entering that view, yet the team still sees only the Default view and each other's sorting. That is not a user error. It is a broken promise.
For anyone who manages a shared workbook, the practical cost is clear. You lose the ability to work independently. One person sorts by date, another by name, and everyone sees the chaos of whoever sorted last. The workaround becomes constant communication, "Don't sort while I'm sorting", which defeats the purpose of a real-time collaboration tool. Worse, this user has done the due diligence: reading support articles, chatting with representatives, even recording the bug. The AI on the Q&A forum recycles the same checklist. The system blames the user while the feature fails.
This matters because it reveals a deeper problem with how modern spreadsheet tools handle multi-user workflows. The technology exists to isolate views, database systems have done it for decades, but spreadsheet applications treat it as an optional layer rather than a core capability. When a feature like Sheet View ships with conditions that are met and still does not work, the trust erodes. Teams cannot rely on the tool to do the one thing it claims to do. They either abandon the feature or abandon the platform.
The fix is not more documentation. It is acknowledging that the current implementation is unreliable for real-world use, then prioritizing a solution that actually isolates sorts and filters per user, regardless of which view is selected. Until that happens, teams should test Sheet View thoroughly before building workflows around it. This user's screen recording is the evidence that Microsoft needs to act on. A feature that only works in theory is not a feature at all.