Topic: in/out board

[cryblood]

Just a quick question,

The owner of the company I work for has taken it upon hisself to create an M$ Excel spread sheet and share it for use as an "in/out" board for the people that work in the office during the day... well... at the risk of microsoft boy (boss-direct, not owner) reading this... IT WORKS LIKE CRAP!  if one person has it open, nobody else can use it.  It has some sorta "time-out" problem that is locking up machines that I haven't been able to understand, let alone find or fix (no knowing how the users are accomplishing that bit).  All in all, bad... bad...



anyway, I REALLY want to replace this!  Does anyone know of a piece of software that will do this?  my first thought was to look for a perl script that I could run via a private ibay, that way it would be available from any computer and if EVERYONE wanted to log themselves out all at once they would be able to!  but alas... I was unable to find said software and I must admit, at this molment anyway, due to time constaints (like I don't have any free time as it is) Perl is quite beyond me. (Yes Charlie, Perl is very high on my list of things to dig into next, but it's still about #3 or #4 on that LONG list)

[kipjes]

cryblood wrote:

>
> Just a quick question,
>
> The owner of the company I work for has taken it upon hisself
> to create an M$ Excel spread sheet and share it for use as an
> "in/out" board for the people that work in the office
> during the day... well... at the risk of microsoft boy
> (boss-direct, not owner) reading this... IT WORKS LIKE CRAP!
> if one person has it open, nobody else can use it.  It has some
> sorta "time-out" problem that is locking up machines
> that I haven't been able to understand, let alone find or fix
> (no knowing how the users are accomplishing that bit).  All in
> all, bad... bad...

is the problem caused by excel or samba?

>
>
>
> anyway, I REALLY want to replace this!  Does anyone know of a
> piece of software that will do this?  my first thought was to
> look for a perl script that I could run via a private ibay,
> that way it would be available from any computer and if
> EVERYONE wanted to log themselves out all at once they would be
> able to!

Have a look at Excels web form wizard. It turns your excelfile in a html page and a perl script which adds information from the html form to a textfile database on your server.

--kipjes

[cryblood]

Hmmm....  I wonder...

I think the problem is more with the dumba** users who, when it doesn't work the first time, open the excel file again and again and again and again (you get the picture(by clicking on the shortcut about 20 times in desperatioin to go HOME after another crappy day at work doing things they never wanted to do when they were 4 years old.

I know it's not samba mainly because the excel file is on one of micro$oft boy's (boss) many NT servers.

I do wonder if I could use the excel web form wiz and transfer it into an ibay,  I didn't even know excel had such a thing... go figure.

Thanks for all the help!

[Jerry]

Excel 2000 is "Web enabled" and will do what the previous person said. Since the script lives on the web host and merely updates the appropiate cell it should work just fine, unless of course people are signing in and out for each other, then it may never be accurate. Excel worksheets were never mean to be multi-user. It is not a MS thing, I can't think of any that were, unless someone has built a "colaboration" product.