Hi,

I have a (large) excel spreadsheet that allows people to maintain an individual assessment of a project over time. Its large because there are upwards of 200 criteria that can be assessed on number of occasions during the life of the project.

A number of these projects may be ongoing at any time so I would like to extend the spreadsheet so that it could select a project from a list, load the data associated with the project, allow maintenance of that data (which is the bit the spreadsheet does at the moment) and save it back to the file/database. That way I have one large spreadsheet and (hopefully) 1 relatively small data file.

The data itself will be about 10 fields describing the project (which can happily go on a form) and then the review data. Any of the 200 criteria may be reviewed and there may be a number or reviews during the life of the project. The criteria are maintained as values in the cells in the body of the spreadsheet effectively as a large array with each criteria being a specific row and each review adding a column to that array.

I could really use some help on how to get started on this (maybe some example code I could follow/modify or a tutorial on the www or something). I have a whole bunch of preliminary questions like
- should I use a database or a flat file
- can I store a range of data (the array) easily or do I have to do each element independently
- how do I connect excel to a file/database
- do I have to do anything differently to run this on a network?
etc

Thanks for any suggestions including (if you feel so inclined) 'too hard'.