Hi Vs, and welcome to Bytes. Database applications are inherently multi-user, which Excel applications are not. Excel does not allow users to open the same worksheet simultaneously - which is why when two users try to do so one of them is locked out and gets the message about opening a read-only copy.
I think that looking at databases in an Excel-ish, one-user-at-a-time way does not assist you in coming to grips with the fundamentally different approach of any relational database, which is inherently a shared application.
Record locking is really nothing to do with shared data access. It relates to what happens when data is edited. The default in Access is to use no locks - in other words, records can be edited by different users without locking (preventing others from editing) the records concerned. The "lock all" record locking you have set simply prevents any other user from editing a record once any user starts to edit a record - it does not in any way provide just read-only access to the data.
Access does provide user-level security and access rights control, but setting up user rights is a fairly complex process, and in the circumstances I do not know if this is the right approach for your needs. Anyway, it is possible to grant access rights to users, but these are not of the 'open a read only copy' variety - user rights apply across the board and determine what they can and cannot see, and what they can and cannot edit, in the database, according to the rights assigned for the user group to which they belong.
-Stewart
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