Architectural Help (Using Excel as Database)

[mattaustin01]

Hi All,

I'm trying to rework an existing project into something that will be easier to manage going forward. At the moment, several teams have their own individual spreadsheets which consolidate up to their team leaders. The downside is that each team's spreadsheet is slightly different in one manner or another, yet holds similar data. The problem is then getting appropriate reporting out of these spreadsheets as the information is held in several different workbooks across network drives.

What I would like to do is create a master database sheet, containing all the information, and then distribute workbooks to the teams that will essentially be "input" workbooks, pulling data from the master database and then amending/uploading any altered data.

I've done similar things before however performance is a little more critical on this project - does anyone know how I can have this link between the input and master spreadsheets? Opening, down/uploading, saving and closing the master database takes too long each time to do an update.

Thanks

 

[mattaustin01]

Any ideas anyone?

 

[jardenp]

Why not use a DB? You can have users input into Access through Excel spreadsheets.