I have been assigned to create a general tracking system in Excel that uses four columns (fields). Each row (record) will hold an itemname (column #1) and three other columns for status, amount, etc.

Two of the requirements are causing me issues:

1) the spreadsheet has to work with both Excel (97 and up) and OpenOffice 2.0, since we have a mix of them across the company

2) the spreadsheet cannot use VBA due to requirement #1 (they don't want to maintain VBA code)

And no, I have been told to use Excel and not a database :-(

My questions are:

1) since I can't use the Excel List feature (it doesn't work in OpenOffice), if I set some custom styles and Data Validation options (I want to use the look up value from a list option) on the first row, how do I apply these to x number of rows that are used by the user? (I want to turn off the grid and have a separator line drawn between the cells). I don't want to pre-select a set number or rows (such as 1000), since some of the custom formats will then cause all 1000 rows to be printed, regardless of whether the cells are empty or not.

2) can I sort on a column (again without using an Excel List) and have the rows (records) sorted correctly or does it just sort the data in the column, thus destroying the record paradigm?

Basically, I'm confused as to how to build a somewhat robust row/column tracking system in Excel (with the constraints listed above) that acts somewhat like a poor-man's database.

Any help or pointers to examples would be greatly appreciated.