shared workbook, saving work my multiple users

hi guys,

need a bit of help with a shared spreadsheet i use in work.

the spreadsheet is pretty much a list, but it has to be updated by several people within the office at the same time.

in the past if more then one person is tryin to save changes to the same cell then it will automatically shift one users changes down a row. lately tho we are getting a diolog box asking about a conflict and asking which users changes we want to keep. there is no option to keep both

any help would be greatly appreciated

Ian

edit: its excel 2003 by the way

Hello,

Shared workbooks are notoriously unreliable. There are only two kinds of Shared Workbooks: Those that are corrupt and those that soon will be.

If you want a reliable system for simultaneous multi-user edits, you will need to use a database system. MS Access or the various flavours of SQL are a viable alternative.

Excel has not been designed for multi-user editing. Even if it seems to support this feature, it has been causing trouble from the get-go, because, in essence, Excel is a single-user application.

Microsoft has not done much to resolve the issues that Shared Workbooks have been causing from the start. Shared Workbooks in all Excel versions are unreliable, prone to data loss and inexplicable behaviour, and, IMPOSSIBLE to troubleshoot, because the issue can hardly ever be recreated on another setup.

So, bite the bullet, forget about Excel and design your system in a true, multi-user capable application.

Sorry, but that's what you get with Shared Workbooks.

cheers,