having issues opening shared workbook on network drive, do i need to set permissions?

I currently have a password secured excel file on my departs Q drive, which everyone can access unfortunately only 1 person can edit at a time. I tried to turn it into a workbook so we could all edit it at the same time but now some of the other users can't access the file at our other buildings throughout the county. Any ideas or suggestion and this is for excel 2010. And I did select the share workbook, and allow multiple users to edit box. everything else is unchanged.

Currently only the people located in my building are able to open up the file and edit correctly at the same time, when someone tries to join from a different location, only they can edit and everyone from the previous location become locked out So only the most recent building to connect to the sheet has editing permissions? Is there anyway to fix this or is this an issue for my IT department to figure out?

Hi,

Difficult to advise without seeing the file, but I'm intrigued by your mention of a password secured file which everyone can access. If every one is allowed to access it why do you need to password protect it.

That said you've mentioned the dreaded words 'shared workbook'. That's at least the second time this week someone has originated a post where this is the case. The general consensus is that shared workbooks should be ignored like the plague. They cause more problems than the solutions they were presumably designed to solve.

The usual advice is to revisit your business process. Usually people create shared workbooks because they want many people to enter data at the same time so that a common database in the workbook can be updated. The better solution is to let individuals have their own independent copies of workbooks but kept in a central common folder, and use a master workbook that contains macros which will trawl through all the individual workbooks and gather data for updating a master database.

Ron neatly summarises it in post # 6 in this thread http://www.excelforum.com/excel-gene...19#post3372619

That actually sounds like a good idea for the master workbook and yeah this shared workbook is making me lose sleep. And basically I work for a county in California that employee's roughly 38,000 workers, by password file that everyone can access I just meant in my department as its well sensitive data. Thanks again for the advice on the workbook but my concern is If we both update information for lets say Richard Buttrey in our person files how will the master solve this issue? the most recently saved will be pulled? or if there's conflicts with data? and vice versa will our personal workbooks be able to update themselves from the master when we first open them?

-excel noobie, I've never touched vba or macro's yet in my 1 week span of trying to learn excel haha

And here's a basic template, and I already have plans to merge all the tabs into 1 sheet once I can figure out how to create a good search feature.