How Check-in and Check-out work in SharePoint

SharePoint is a collaborative platform. A central feature is the ability to share documents with other users. But what if multiple users try to edit the same document at the same time? This can lead to versioning conflicts and confusion about changes. How can this be prevented?
SharePoint provides a feature called document Check-In and Check-Out. The purpose is to exclusively lock a document for modification by a user. Once the changes are complete the user can check-in the updated document to release the lock and make the changes visible to other users. For more details click here.