Can you tell me the difference between a regular Excel workbook and a binary
workbook?

We use a shared workbook as a tracking system for our department, and we
often have conflicts, crashes, or other miscellaneous catastrophes. My
manager was wondering if saving it as a binary workbook might reduce the
number of problems that we experience.

Thank you for your help.

Yes, it might reduces technically because As Excel Macro-enabled Workbook, but storing information in binary form rather than XML documents for opening and saving documents more quickly and efficiently. Intended especially for very large documents with tens of thousands of rows, and/or several hundreds of columns.

whereas Regular workbook just saves in XML format.

All the best.
Bala