Shared Workbook issues

[pfr]

We've been sharing one of our large spreadsheets between two to three users for the past 6 months or so. We've had a few bumps along the way with the maximum format errors that we've surpassed, but the one that just popped up worries me:

User A is populating new rows in one of the sheets and the formatting dissapears over night and never appears on user B's workbook. Even the number formatting changes (i.e. it does not retain date formatting or dollar formatting). Problem is that the users use these cell colorations to determine what needs to be done on a particular account.

I did notice when on user B's version of the sheet (missing formating) that some of the Cell Row and Column numbers have turned red (i.e. row heading "99" is normally black and the color shifted to a dark red... along with Column marker "AD").

This is perplexing. We are using Excel 2003 on XP SP3 machines. If you have any ideas, thanks in advance!

Cheers,
pfr

 

[RoryA]

Shared Workbooks are notoriously unreliable and prone to corruption and weird behaviour. Generally speaking the only certain cure is not to share them, although you can sometimes cure issues by unsharing, saving, closing, reopening and then resharing. If you do have to stick with Shared Workbooks then I would strongly recommend keeping regular backups!