Someone may come up with a better idea than this, but it's probably the way
I'd deal with it.

I'd set up a special folder just to do this work in. I'd put your
answers.xls file into that folder and also put any returned surveys in there
with it (that presents a file naming problem since they'll probably all be
named questions.xls - but that's a separate issue). I'd also create a
subfolder with a name like HasBeenProcessed or DoneWithThese

Then I'd write code in answers.xls that would get the filenames of all other
..xls files in the same folder with it (checking file names against its own
name so that it doesn't try to process itself) and open each one, one at a
time, extract the data from it putting that into answers.xls, closing the
questions#.xls file and then moving the questions#.xls file into that
HasBeenProcessed subfolder.

As I said earlier, you've got a bit of a filenaming problem with the
questions.xls files going out and coming back. One way or another you've got
some work to do to be able to dump them all into a single folder upon return.
Possibly the easiest way to do this is to set up a macro that takes a single
copy of that file and copies it out to disk giving unique name such as
questions0001.xls, questions0002.xls, ... questions1000.xls and then
attaching them individually to the outgoing emails. And that's a process I'd
sure look into automating also <g

"Beav" wrote:

Let's say I have a spreadsheet(questions.xls) that represents a
customer questionaire, formated in a fancy page layout. I will email
that questionaire to 1000 people. They will fill it out and email it
back to me.

I have this other spreadsheet(answers.xls) that is just a table of
data, representing the answers.

I want to just drag the many returned questions files and drop one or
more onto a batch file, or perhaps onto ahswers.xls itself, and have a
macro copy over the data to the answers table and then leave the
original in place.

Any ideas?

Thanks.