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

[Jeff Newmiller]

Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 January 2008, Henry House wrote:
>> On 2008-01-15, wrote Dylan Beaudette:
>> [...]
>>
>>> YES - this is how I would approach this problem if I were in a position
>>> to babysit their data. I have put together several LAPP
>>> (linux-apache-postgres-php) projects- but only for things I was directly
>>> working on. I was searching for some kind of compromise between doing it
>>> correctly (i.e. a database) and doing it less incorrectly via SVN or the
>>> like.
>> Well the good thing about using SVN is that at least no data will be
>> lost once it is committed. So even if person A overwrites person B's
>> work, the data can be recovered (albeit with manual intervention). And
>> if this happens it just might demonstrate the need for a proper
>> RDBMS-base solution to those in charge.
> 
> Yeah... It looks like they will be resorting to their old system of personal 
> communication mitigated data disaster prevention (PCMDDP).... When it crashes 
> and burns I think that I will have them go with an SVN + CSV file setup.
> 
> Thanks for all of the great ideas!
> 
> Dylan
> 

I highly recommend using a real database with ODBC client access.
Microsoft Access is quite easy for Microsofties to get used to,
and has already been mentioned can serve as a front-end for connecting
to the shared data. OpenOffice can also present a tabular user interface
with no programming.  No programming means practically no maintenance on
your part.  They can use a query builder to get subsets of
the data, copy it into Excel, and analyze it to their hearts
content.  Another advantage of this is that it is easy to copy/paste
large blocks of data around (including appending their data to the table)
which is not so easy with a web interface.

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