It is always bad practice to have a file 'open' for amendment to more than
one person at a time. It creates all sorts of problems around the question
"what is the latest".

As a compromise if 'another person' ONLY adds new members (with their unique
membership number) it should be easy to add these back into your friend's
database. There should, however, be a very clear working understanding that
your friend should not change any of the 'original' data (not one character
or digit) as any changes will not be transferred onto the main database and
be lost. It will be very difficult not to succumb to making a minor change,
the whole thing cannot be monitored and any lost changes will be the fault
of the other one. It is a compromise that is rather flaky and one which I
would definitely not recommend.

A much better solution would be for all updates to the database to be sent
to the one person who operates the database. In this way there is no
duplication or misunderstanding and responsibility for the database (and
also consider data protection requirements) rests squarely on one person.

Regards.

Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions

"Ted Rogers" wrote in message
...
I have been asked to try and solve a problem that a friend has. (Please try
and ignore the workflow - I have suggested other ways of doing it but he
won't have it!). He has a spreadsheet containing around 1500 entries. These
consist of club members with an exclusive reference number each. My friend
is responsible for the overall membership but sends a copy of the file to
another person who operates within it month to month. At the end of the
period the file is sent back to my friend with new members etc. and my
friend then wants to import it into his file (which he has been amending at
the same time)

What he would like to do is to import this file, avoid duplications and
highlight in some way the new members (by maybe colouring the lines) to
distinguish them from old ones (the entries are sorted by surname so new
entries could appear in the middle of the sheet).

I hope this is clear, I know he's be better off using Access but he's been
using this for years and wants to do it this way. Is it possible please?

Many thanks,

Ted