Shared Workbook Access issue

Hey excel whizzes!

Im stuck.

Hence being here.

Basically I work in a call centre which I recently adoped a new campaign where I get the staff making outbound calls so they can fix existing customers accounts, anyways our database drops out a good 30,000 account numbers, names and phone numbers for fixing at a time in an xls file.

I divide that into 6 files with 5000 records in each

I have successfully made a template for the agents to run, click a button and it goes to our network drive, picks one of the 6 files at random, picks one of the 5000 records at random time stamps it (also with the agents name) and returns the account number, Name and phone number to the agents template and just pastes them in so they can call them.

When collecting this data from one of the shared master list sheets, time stamps the row with the agents name & time, Then saves the file so that another agent won't accidently pick up the same record. My understanding is when sharing a worksheet you have to save it to update your changes??

The whole thing works great except...

WHen I have 60 agents accessing the files at the same time and the saving of the master list is happening they get locked despite being shared and overlaps happen...

is there a way to make it so I don't have to save every time a record is collected it OR I can test the masterlist to make sure no one else in it and saving data so they'd just have to wait a second for it to process???


That just turned into an essay im sorry... it's just rather complex

Hello dori_dave,

Welcome to the Forum!

When a workbook is shared, the entire workbook is transferred to the user's computer, not just a single record from the data in the workbook. This means that multiple copies of the workbook are open at the same time. Excel then has to resolve any potential data conflicts that arise in these copies. As the number of users grows, so do do potential problems like data loss or corruption. You would be better off using a database program, like Access, to handle this volume of data reliably.

Sincerely,
Leith Ross