Meeting log ideas

[chrisparfitt]

Hi all,

I'm trying to create a comprehensive meeting log for people within my department who can fill in details about meetings they have with internal & external groups. I'd like to put it in an excel file, with information like Date, attendees, organisation, etc all across the top. However, some of this information, like feedback, include quite a lot of text. Is there any creative way to do this in excel? Doing it in a word table makes it not very pretty on the eye, and I want this log to be as use friendly as possible as to encourage people to actually fill it out.

Thanks!
Chris

[Richard Buttrey]

Is the text free format or are you able to offer a choice of standarised text responses?

[chrisparfitt]

Thanks for your response, Richard.
Text is free format

[Richard Buttrey]

This is more a design question than a pure Excel question.

Stating the obvious you need to capture the comments text data in a single cell of your database.
I'd be inclined to capture the data either from a suitably large TextBox on an Activex UserForm, or a dedicated input cell on a separate data entry sheet, and then use one or other of those to update your database without varying the row height where text overflows a cell.

Then have some separate reporting functionality wherein you prompt the user to select specific database field values which become the filter criteria in an Advanced Filter that extracts data from the flat database into a separate reporting sheet and perhaps use a macro to format the ouput to display all relevant text.

Not sure if this is what you'e expecting.