Shared workbook just for user notes

  • Hello. Our team is working with Office 365. We have a central workbook that gets created each day that has ~2000 records, and then everyone else has a personal workbook that pulls in that data, and they filter on their name to process their records. In the process, they enter notes into a 'user notes' column. During the update of their personal workbooks, their user notes are maintained and transferred to the newly updated data. The desire is to be able to have EVERYONE'S user notes maintained and pulled into the central workbook. This way, there can be much more efficient workload sharing. Please note, I've tried a shared workbook, which is fine for a .xlsx file, but the individual workbooks are .xlsb, which in my experience (as well as with .xlsm), has not worked well at all with shared workbooks.


    Does anyone have a thought about how I might create a process to enable individual user workbooks see everyone else's user notes? Thank you!

  • Do you have any sort of database program (eg Access or SQL Server)?

    Rory
    Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: nothing works and they don’t know why

  • This sort of thing is better in a database. With Access, you could use userforms in Excel to edit/update the data or simply distribute an Access front-end to everyone. With SQL server you can do the same or you can use something like Power Apps to create an app for the data work.


    You can also do it with a workbook as the data source but it doesn't handle concurrent users quite as well - though with ADO you can mitigate that to some extent with batch updating and disconnected recordsets.

    Rory
    Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: nothing works and they don’t know why

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