Traffic Lights

[Zico]

At work so I will be quick.

We use a spreadsheet at work to maintain a record of traffic lights on the highway for our contact centre staff to find out who/what/where/when etc.

Obviously this has it's limitations but the main one is simultaneous access by the 6 or 7 people who need to go in and update the sheet.

All other access by other people is read only.

I want to put forward a suggestion of a simple (affordable) system that we could implement that would allow simultaneous access by the people who need to update the list. It's the biggest problem as we all end up fighting for access.

[Jonny69]

Probably MS Access or SQL, but you'll need someone to set it up to start with.

[Garp]

Google Wave!

Oh, no wait..

[Mark]

Some sort of database. Software can be free (e.g. MySQL), implementation will probably need a programmer, though it's pretty easy to do.

[Zico]

I'm off work on Friday. I will put something down on paper to confirm a few things and post back.

[kaiowas]

Just thought I'd mention "Shared workbooks" seeing as no-one else has. You may have already ruled it out, but then you may also not be aware the option exists.

Essentially once a workbook has been setup as a shared workbook multiple people can open it for write access simultaneously however you are prevented from carrying out certain actions, mostly stuff which involves changing the structure of the workbook such as adding/removing/renaming worksheets and deleting/inserting rows or columns.