Long story short is that Excel isn't designed as a collaborative tool.
So it shouldn't be used as such. You don't drive a screw with a
hammer, after all.

On Jan 24, 9:28 am, "Bernie Deitrick" <deitbe @ consumer dot org
wrote:
Scott,

Here's what a fellow MVP (Jan Karel Pieterse) has to say about shared workbooks:

****************
General remarks.

I frequent the crashes/gpf's newsgroup regularly. Due to the number of reports
about problems with shared workbooks I always advise against using the feature
in the first place, especially in the case where the goal is to enable
simultaneous editing of the data. The kinds of problems I have seen reported
a

- (partly) loss of edited data
- changes not saved
- corruption of file, with sometimes complete loss of file

Now I don't know the status or relative frequency of problems with shared
workbooks, nor do I know if stability has improved over the versions up to
2007, but I tend to say: wanna share data? use Access or any other multi-user
centric application rather than Excel.
*****************

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP

"Scott" wrote in ...



Hello,

I have a shared database set up in Excel where approximately 30 users
contribute data, weekly. Each user has a specific (and unique to others)
record they are responsible for. The database is set up on a shared LAN
drive. Each user has been instructed to update the database "in-place".
That is, not to take a copy of it, update their record and resave the entire
file back to the original location. This is obviously to maintain security
and version control.

Recently, we've heard complaints from some users that their data entered the
prior week "reverted" back to old data. A couple of reasons for this come to
mind:
1. The user did not save the workbook when they finished entering data.
2. A user did not update the database "in-place" and thus overwrote other's
records and possibily old data.
3. Some technical problem with excel and shared workbooks unknown to me?
4. Others perhaps?

Question regarding # 2. How do I prevent a user from saving a copy,
updating the record and rewriting of the database back to its location?

Regards- Hide quoted text -- Show quoted text -