[vox-tech] collaborative data storage (of excel files)

[Dylan Beaudette]

Hi,

some of the people in my lab are interested in collaboratively compiling a 
large quantity of environmental data- each user appending several hundred 
measurements of several variables every week.

They are currently emailing around a spread sheet file and there have been 
numerous data accidents. Now they are asking to put the file onto a shared 
drive, so that they can access it remotely. This sounds like a terrible idea 
to me- even worse than the previous attempt.

The data are essentially rows and cols of numbers that are added to and edited 
weekly.

At first I thought subversion might be helpful, but revision control doesn't 
work so well with binary data (excel files)... unless there is something I 
don't know about. It would be hard to detect conflicts, or to merge data. 
However, it would allow for timestamps and revision numbers to provide some 
level of authority.

Designing some kind of database-driven system seems like a logical choice, but 
I do not have the time to do this. Perhaps there is already something out 
there.

Does anyone have some insight into how to solve this data management nighmare?

Cheers,

Dylan


-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341