I have a shared file on a shared drive. In the past some users of this
shared file have copied the file to their laptops and taken it home.
Several days later they would copy the file they took home and paste it
over the file on the shared drive. Obviously any changes made to the
shared drive file in those few days were lost completely. The only
solution I could think of was to make it read-only, but that won't work
because changes do need to be made. I guess one way is set the
attributes of the file so that it thinks that someone has the file open
at all times and will not allow someone to delete or copy over the
file. I don't know how to do this though. I am pretty good with VB.
The file contains alot of VB code including a login that gives
different users different permissions. So I am open to any suggestions
including suggestions that involve complicated vb. This file does need
to remain a shared file because several people need to edit at the same
time. Thank you in advance for any help.

Hello,

We had many issues with shared MS-Excel files and now ban them due to their
unstable nature.

One thing you can do is add an "On Open" function that checks the location
of the file, if it is not on your network where it is supposed to be, display
a warning message and close the file.

Typically, we deal with this by creating a separate folder and file for each
user (department) in our organization. That way each user can open and use
their own file as needed. Then I code a program that simply loops through all
the user files and collects and assimilates the data into one file. When this
code runs, it opens the user files "read only" so there are no sharing
problems. This seems to work well for us.

HTH.

" wrote:

I have a shared file on a shared drive. In the past some users of this
shared file have copied the file to their laptops and taken it home.
Several days later they would copy the file they took home and paste it
over the file on the shared drive. Obviously any changes made to the
shared drive file in those few days were lost completely. The only
solution I could think of was to make it read-only, but that won't work
because changes do need to be made. I guess one way is set the
attributes of the file so that it thinks that someone has the file open
at all times and will not allow someone to delete or copy over the
file. I don't know how to do this though. I am pretty good with VB.
The file contains alot of VB code including a login that gives
different users different permissions. So I am open to any suggestions
including suggestions that involve complicated vb. This file does need
to remain a shared file because several people need to edit at the same
time. Thank you in advance for any help.