How Many Simultaneous Users Can Be Safely Handled?

[Alan Greenwood]

My boss wants me to write a program which runs at login time on our
Novell network using Windows 95, NT4, 2000 and XP workstations. We
have a mixture of Office 97 and Office 2000. The program will save
information about the user into a network Excel spreadsheet (by
supplying data to a built-in macro in the sheet) and then exit.
Estimated run time for the program is a few seconds (including the
time it takes to start up Excel in the background, save the
information and then close it down).

The aspect that most concerns me is the possibility of 'overloading'
the sheet with too many users. Assuming the worst possible scenario
there could be up to a couple of hundred users logging in at the same
time (but not *exactly* at the same time, of course).

My question is whether or not I am liable to run into problems with
this scenario. Will Excel be capable of handling this situation? If
not is there any way in which I could trap any errors arising from
simultaneous access by too many users? I am using the Delphi
programming language but code snippets using any other language would
be welcome.

Thanks a lot in advance to anyone who can help.

 

[Jens Thiel]

Can you log to text files and updatete the spreadsheet once a day or every
hour?

Jens.

 

[Jon Peltier]

Or use a database file?

To answer your question directly, the most simultaneous users that can be reliably
handles in a shared workbook is at most 1, and sometimes that's not done really
well, because of the functionality that you give up to share a workbook.

- Jon
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Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
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