"WLMPilot" wrote in message
...
The county I work for uses a network and MS OUTLOOK (for emailing). Once
a
month, each outlying EMS station fills out a supply reorder, saves it,
signs
onto the network and attaches the workbook to the email and sends it to
the
supply officer.

I am trying to figure out the best way to set up an inventory control and
have the master inventory "file" look at each workbook that is downloaded
and
saved (on the supply officer's end) and adjust all the inventory.

From my little bit of programming knowledge with excel, I have some ideas
but was wondering if anybody might be able to throw some other ideas my
way.

Basically, my idea consist of having a MASTER inventory control
spreadsheet
for the supply officer. Each station (7 in all) will have a workbook with
12
worksheets predefined with the reorder setup. Unless someone monkeys with
worksheet names, etc., the MASTER spreadsheet would look at each workbook
and
find the correct supply order and pull the numbers and adjust the totals.

Any ideas are appreciated on this.

Thanks,
Les


As much as I love Excel, you'd really be better off studying a bit about
relational databases, and using Access instead of Excel for your project. An
inventory control system *can* be designed in Excel, but there will be
moments when you have great ideas that a spreadsheet cannot handle. These
"gotcha" moments can be avoided by using the right tool to start with. The
link below discusses relational database theory (a bit). If it mentions
particular software, it's not important. You can implement these ideas in
any number of database products.

http://r937.com/relational.html