Help Needed

[JasmineChavezz]

Friends,
I want to help an organization with tracking the hours of volunteers. They have to keep track of all the hours volunteers spend in different projects and activities every week . Right now, they're filling out paper forms but I want it to be electronically through exell. It would make it so easier for them just to have the volunteers access the website and turn in their hours through the program I want to design.
I don't know how to get started; Maybe you all can collaborate with me on this. I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

 

[Ruddles]

Since you say you don't know how to start on this, I suspect you're not too familiar with VBA, Web page design or server-side scripting. As such, you're either going to have to acquire these skills yourself or you'll be relying very heavily on someone else to design and write the whole lot for you. If you've done a little programming in the past and understand something about Web pages, it shouldn't be too difficult to do it yourself.

I would probably be thinking along the following lines:-

• Create a Web page with an HTML form on it for people to enter their information.
• Either write a PHP script which takes the information from the form and writes it to a file on the server and then a VBA script which reads the file from the server and adds it to the 'main' Excel workbook.
• Or write a PHP script which takes the information from the form and emails it to a 'collection' email account and then a VBA script which runs on the 'collection' account, detecting incoming data from the PHP script and adding it to the 'main' workbook.

Your Web server will have to support PHP and, if you use the email method, it will need to have mail() enabled - not all Web hosts enable it by default.

Mind you, I've never been anywhere near the forefront of Web design so there may well be a better and/or simpler way of achieving this. Anyone?