Editing in Excel

[China Doll]

Hi,

I use an excel spreadsheet on a daily basis with my collegue and it can be very inconveniant when one of us is using it and the other can only enter the spreadsheet as 'read only.' I've been told that you can set the spreadsheet up so that more than one user can edit at the same time and this would be an ideal solution, I've set up a tester sheet so that we can have a go at playing around with it but I really don't wan to make a decison based on a few minutes f@rt ar$ing around to see if we can both save our work at the same time. The spreasheet we use is probably the most vital part of our jobs and to lose anything on it would cause major problems for my department, not to mention massive upset for the patients I work with (which is not fair on them).

I spoke to our IT department and by their own admission they don't really have anyone there who's an expert on Excel so I'm really just wondering if anyone out there knows how stable multi users in a spreadsheet is? Does this go wrong a lot or is it fairly sound? I'd really appreciate any adivce anyone may have.

(If it makes any different, there are no charts or graphs on the spreadsheet. There are a lot of coloured cells and we use coloured writing too (red, orange, green system mainly) to indicate other things).

Thanks very much.

[ChuckFickens]

what version (hi China BTW)

if it's earlier than 2007 click on tools and then share workbook and stick a tick in allow others to edit this file.

if it's on a server than all users that want to edit the file need write privileges to the server share (your IT dept can check that)

[ChuckFickens]

oh and, if you click on the advanced tab on the share worksheet page you can enable change tracking on the worksheet, which should let you roll back to a previous version of the sheet if there is any problems.

Also depending on what version of windows your servers are running here, but if it's server2003 or later than then volume shadowing is an excellent tool to protect against unintentional data loss (it's saved me a whole lot of work on several occasions, again speak to your IT department about it)

[ChuckFickens]

great, 3 answers to one question, I really should read the whole question before answering ;)

It's stable sharing workbooks, we do it here at work quite a lot.

[China Doll]

If it's a thumbs up from you Chuck then I'm already feeling less nervous about it!

[ChuckFickens]

it's worth a read of this, particularly the part about conflicts and dealing with them, but I have found (here where I work at least) in practice it's very rare to get two people trying to work on the same part of the sheet so conflicts don't happen often.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA0101 30571033.aspx

Golden rule though, especially if it's a job critical workbook, backup, backup and backup.