"Jumbo's Chippy" wrote in message
...
I am designing a spreadsheet that will be used to monitor incidents
involving youngsters and when contact has been made with their parents /
guardians in relation to incidents. I am having difficulty in organising my
info though, as I don't want the user to scroll along across the
spreadsheet and so want the info to appear on screen without having to
scroll. Having said that, there is loads of info and so, I am wondering the
best way to go about it. I will need the following details:-

- Surname
- Foreame
- Date of Birth
- Telephone
- Address
- Telephone
- School
- Incident date
- Incident location
- Incident details
- Was contact made with regards to incident? (for this, a dropdown menu
listing "telephone, letter, visit"

Likewise, I want the spreadsheet to autoformat should the same Surname AND
Forename appear twice in the list.

I understand the issue, but I don't understand what you mean by "autoformat"
if their are duplicates. What do you visualize happening?

This is a situation which database software handles with grace. (Sorry -
couldn't help saying it again!)



Any suggestions? I played about with the idea of using comments in the
cells, however as it will be used by multiusers, would possibly need to
make the spreadsheet more user-friendly.

What's so UNfriendly about comments?


Now, having played about with the above, there is just far too many
columns to fit on screen at any one time.

In Excel, click on Help. After it loads, click on the Answer Wizard tab. In
the search box, type the words "window split" without the quotation marks,
then click Search. On the right, you should see these results:
View different parts of a worksheet at the same time
What do you want to do?
View two parts of a sheet at the same time

Keep row and column labels visible as you scroll

The first choice may partially solve your problem, although with the amount
of data you're trying to store, nothing will help completely. What you could
do is design more than one type of split window, program them into macros,
and attach the macros to buttons at the top of the sheet. Then, users could
just click the buttons to see different views of the data. And, with a sheet
you already have, try clicking View, Zoom, and playing with the numbers to
bring more cells into the screen area.