I worked with shared workbooks, and embedded with lots of code, for about 9
months. Headache beyond belief!! Very erratic; some weeks we had no
problems and some weeks we had nothing but problems. I think the Help menu
says that the max. number of users for shared workbooks is 255, but in my
experience it is much, much, much less and it really depends on the size of
the file.

As you may expect, the smaller the file, the better the
performance.

Without making the file a Shared Workbook, there is no way you will be able
to let multiple users access the file simultaneously.

I would say, try to avoid doing this in Excel, at all costs.
As an alternative, Access should work quite well in the scenario you
described. Actually, this would be a piece of cake for Access. You are
setting yourself up for major disappointment if you try to make excel do this

Good luck,
Ryan€”






"FSt1" wrote:

hi
i would consider moving the excel database file into access.
access was designed to handle multiple users. excel was not.

my thoughts
regards
FSt1

"JeremyJ" wrote:

Our company has an Excel Database ("Database File") on the server. There is
a second Excel file ("User File") on the server that both accesses and
updates the Database File. There are 3 people on the network with more to
come. I have two questions regarding this:

1) The User File needs to be able to support "Multiple, Simultaneous Users".
What is the best way to accomplish this with out using Microsoft's Shared
Workbook as I have heard there is a loss of functionality. One option I
thought of is when Person "A" opens the User File it automatically saves it
as a new file so that Person "B" could open the User File with out it being
'read only'. Would this work? Is there a better way?

2) It seems to me that the Database File would have to be closed for
multiple users to access it as the same time. What is the best way to Read
from & Write to the Closed Database File?