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Old September 15th, 2003, 09:18 AM
Bill Manville
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Default Update timeframe for linked data.

On other peoples' computers the links are to the copy of your master
worksheet as saved on disc, not to the sheet as you see it on your
screen.

To get other people to see the latest version you will need to save
your sheet and they will need to explicitly update their sheet using
Edit / Links / Update Link.

You could set up the "viewers" to periodically update their links using
an OnTime macro.

But Excel is really not a multi-user application.

If you stored the information in an Access table you could do better,
but the viewers would again need to requery the table at regular
intervals (e.g. using a Timer event on the form) to see new records as
they were added. The sorting could be done by the query on which the
form is based so you would not need to re-order the records in the
table.

An alternative would be to have the viewers set as an Excel sheet which
has a query to the master table (whether in an Excel file on disc or an
Access table), to retrieve the latest information. In Excel 2000 or
later the query could be set to run automatically at regular intervals.
In Excel 97 you would need to run an OnTime macro to do the update.

You would set it up via Data / Get External Data / New Database Query
(or similar - wording depends on Excel version). Again, the sorting
can be done by the query so you don't need to keep the original table
sorted.

Hope something in there helps!

Bill Manville
MVP - Microsoft Excel, Oxford, England
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