An MS Office "how to" question - or four.

Factual Questions
1

I’d be happy to have someone point me to an appropriate site for help. MS used to have free online user help, that I can no longer find.

Anyway, if anyone can help, I’d be most appreciative. I have the following needs within the MS Office suite, and can’t figure out how to make it work. The issue:

We have a daily MS PowerPoint brief that automatically links to several documents all over our server. The documents are Word and Excel format. What I’d like to accomplish is have all this information feeding the PP on one file - Excel or Word or other Office program.

The needs and problems:

  1. The file would have to allow for multiple users to make edits simultaneously. Excel allows this, Word does not.

  2. The document would have to allow text editing, object imbedding (word docs) and spreadsheet input. (we have a spreadsheet that would need to be included on this file) No problem in Excel, except when you share an Excel file, the text box features and object imbedding features become disabled.

  3. The file would need to allow for automatic linking of info to a MS PP file.

  4. Software, other than MS Office, is pretty much out of the question. I’m operating on a gov’t network and third party software is not an option here. (Unless it goes through about a year of testing and approvals)

That’s basically it at a minimum. Anyone have any ideas on this? Thanks in advance!

2

How on earth does this work, in practical terms? The main thrust of version control (both sftware and policies) everywhere I have worked has been to ensure that multiple users DO NOT make edits simultaneously. How would you know which edits supersede? Which version gets saved?

Sailboat

3

How, specifically, it works I do not know. However, Excel does allow this. The problem is, when you share an excel file, the other features we need, such as object imbedding, become disabled.

4

Sounds like you’re describing Office Binder

5

Oops. I specifically included the phrase “in practical terms” in a ham-handed atempt to clarify that I wasn’t concerned about the methodology of the software, but about how you and/or your company deal with the version-control issues of multiple users making simultaneous edits.

Traditionally, and by that I mean from the evolution of documents that are routed among different contributors right up to, say, this morning, various version control techniques have been applied mostly with the goal of keeping mul;tiple users from making simultaneous changes. There are other aspects to version control, but that’s the kety, overriding concern, because multiple people making changes at once, or thinking they are, has caused untold misery to writers, editors, and project managers. At the very least, if I change paragraph 4 and you nre-write it too, one of us is wasting our time, and someone will have to decide how to merge the two versions. Worst case, your version will spin off into the workflow and mine will too, and other people will spend work effort (time and money) developing two separate versions until someone realizes it, at which point MORE effort will be wasted trying to figure out what went wrong.

Working with documents, this has always been our biggest bugbear – and it’s why most software is written to prevent such activity. To call it a pet peeve would be to drastically underestimate its impact on project management, proposals, and business writing – and it’s far more critical when the documents concern software, science, or engineering.

Aside from the parochial concerns of editors, there are real-world consequences to losing control of which version of a document is current. Buildings and bridges have physically collapsed due to undocumented or poorly-documented changes to, or versions of, blueprint plans, for example.

Assuming for the sake of argument that someone could think of a good reason for multiple users to make simultaneous edits, then my second question about how the people involved would know how to save a given version and which version was now the canonical version come into play, regardless of how the software handles it.

So I’m curious – what is it that you do that makes simultaneous changes by different people desirable, and how has it been handled prior to this point?

Sailboat

6

Basically, the form would have different sections or areas to it. Each division officer would only have to make changes to their own section, leaving the rest alone. Therefore, there shouldn’t be any attempts to edit the same data by two different people.

Simultaneous editing is desirable because up to 10 or more people over the span of a 100 miles or so (within the same network) will want to get their updates in at the end of the day.

Prior to this, the data was entered into several documents at the different locations which were e-mailed out and then someone manually transferred relevant info into one word document at the end of the day. Many times, one of the documents would be ‘locked for editing’ by someone and you’d have to wait. On occasion, you’d have to track them down to close the file so you could your info in. Currently, there are about 5 different word docs and spreadsheets which feed the final ‘customer’, which is a powerpoint file.

I’m trying to incorporate several different data collection issues into a ‘one-stop shopping’ document for simplicity’s sake while making everyone’s life a bit easier; however I realize that what I desire may very well be impossible without 3rd party software.