File Collaboration between 2 Windows XP Computers.?

I have 2 Win XP Professional PCs in my office. Let's call them PC-A & PC-B.

PC-A has a directory that contains lots of Excel files. This directory is shared via windows file sharing. The problem occurs is that when PC-A & PC-B opens the same file at the same time, to make changes, the earlier updates will be lost.

For example When PC-A opens FileX and PC-B opens File-X too. PC-A now updates FileX and PC-B updates FileX too. PC-A saves the file followed by PC-B. The updates by PC-A will be lost.

How do I solve this? What I am looking for is probably a locking mechanism such that when PC-A opens the file, it will be locked & access to that file is denied.

Do suggest any other alternatives if there is a better(and hopefully cheap) solution to this problem or windows file sharing. As both PCs are used by non-IT guys, I'm looking for a easy to use solution.

Both PCs are on the same LAN.
Thank you. =)

Sorry to leave this out:
The use of Excel is a must as it contains all 3yrs worth of macros + the billing document send by my clients are all in excel.

So I'm kind of looking for a additional software/setup instead of switching excel.

Sorry that i left this out.

can you use access instead of excel - access does not have this problem - access is designed to be shared - excel isn't

a way around this is to host excel on a webpage but probably moving to access is easier

Use Google Docs on the internet, which allows you to make and edit spreadsheets and documents online for free. More than one person can edit a file at the same time. Plus, you can access the files from anywhere using your google account.

Create a policy between the two workers so that one works on it at a time. If the two must be done at the same time. Load it to the web. Also the other comment was right. Access is more share friendly.

Use remote desktop -- this will allow you to work on PC-A's screen from PC-B. Open the file on PC-A only, then just remotly access PC-A when it needs to be edited elsewhere. Only one instance of the screen will be available at a time -- logging in remotely will log out the computer locally. This will prevent a double access.

Alternatively, a similar solution such as RealVNC would allow the screen to exist both locally and remotely at the same time. This would allow the spreadsheet to remain up and two people attempting to edit it at the same time should become obvious pretty quickly.

I thought about this problem a fair amount. You are clearly outgrowing the solutions you have and need to scale in some way. I always thought windows would lock an excel file when one user opened it, and subsequent users trying to open the same file would only have read access.

If that's not the case, then you need some kind of version control. Version control is a system that has one master repository, and tracks changes to all files in that repository. That way, people can check out a local copy, but they can't modify the original. Then, when they want to save their changes, they have to check their file back into the repository.

It works the best with text-based files, but I think it would work as a solution for you.

It might take a little expertise to set the repository up, but even a nontechnical user should be able to use a tool like TortoiseCVS:
http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
to check files in and out.

And... if someone messes up, you have a complete history of every version of a file checked in. Good luck. Here's some general information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_co...

Seriously, I looked around and don't know any way of implementing the kind of file locking you're talking about. It seems simple, but when people need multi-person access to the same dataset.... it means they're starting to outgrow a single-user spreadsheet solution.

Is there someone at your organization with the expertise to begin migrating some of that important data to some kind of database?

The only excel-specific sharing solution I could find is this guy:
http://www.badblue.com/excelweb.htm

I'm guessing that's not what you need, however, since everyone needs the powerful macros for each file.

Good Luck.

I have done this before

please create a test excel file to practice and put it into the shared folder

what u have to do is :

right click in the excel document --- properties -- security

if the users that use this file are register there and in permission they should have all the checks in the column of allow

if the user is not there u can add them and modify this option

what the real problem is that there is a check box that says modify , write and read , etc

and those probabily are not selected.

if u have a back up of the main excel file, do this with that file because it was already been in use

i hope this help u out