I created a timesheet addin for charity my daughter works for that read /
writes to an excel database. Access would have been easier but I was not
allowed to use it.

250 staff submit a timesheet (& holiday requests) each week and so far with
almost 3 years use, it has not caused any problems. The application allows
staff to retrieve copies of submitted timesheets, holiday requests & view a
yearly leave planner for their department. All this data is extracted from a
database workbook residing on a server.

The trick in using excel in this manner is to only open the database for as
long as is necessary to populate your user workbooks (or userforms) with data
or for writing data to the database from user workbooks - in most cases this
would be no longer than a few seconds at the most!

You need to think which process your application only needs to extract data
from the database read only. (no user conflicts) and when read / write
database functionality is required (user conflict potential) In read / write
mode, your application would need to test if the database is already open
read / write to prevent user conflicts.

Ron Debruin site has some good examples of transferring data from an excel
workbook to an excel database which should give you some pointers. However, I
should warn you that to make it all work requires a lot of VBA & bug testing
- Access is much easier!!

http://www.rondebruin.nl/copy1.htm

--
jb


"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?