synchronisity

  • Thread starter Thread starter jonny
  • Start date Start date
J

jonny

hello,

I'm not sure whether i'm in the right forum but it seems
like a good place to start.

I have made an excel program for site inspectors which
only has two users, each with a copy of the program on
their desktop, both with each others information on one
file. What i really want is to have a copy on a network
group file so i can make any ammendments to the program,
which will then be passed on to their copies on their
desktop, probably in a similar way to website
synchronisation which is updated every so often.

An even better solution (but probably much harder!) would
be if they kept a file on their own desktop with their
own details, but I could update a master copy (change
macros and userforms) which would then update their basic
version without changing any of the information on their
excel sheets.

I don't know whether this made any sense but if anyone
has any solutions it would be fantastic.

TIA
Jonny
 
My group has been using Excel and other spreadsheet programs for about 20
years within the company and with clients. In order to allow us to enhance
our applications without the users losing their data with every upgrade, we
have always saved the data apart from the application. So users open our
application in Excel and then (from a custom menu) choose to load a data
file, usually with a special file name extension like "XPE" even though it's
an Excel file.

Of course users will have to save their data before they exit the
application. They never save the application, just the data file. We
always save a "data file version" number in our data files so that we can
change the structure of the data files and still recognize and load older
data files.

This approach is great for users but hard to do because you have to totally
take over the Excel UI to do it right/make it bullet-proof. An easier way
for you might be to include a "data retrieval macro" in each new version of
your application. This macro would ask them where their old workbook was
and then open it and copy/paste all the data into the new version. It would
save the new version with the data and strongly suggest to the users that
they not use the old version any more....
 
Perhaps keep the application code etc in a workbook separate from th
data so you just need to use the new book and delete the old ? Yo
would need to keep the book name the same for the initial button t
work and start everything off. Also keep it in he same folder as th
data file
 
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