I am looking to do the same thing. My experience with trying to use Excel with many people possibly hitting it at the same time does not make it the best tool. Thats why we are going to add the ODBC to connect to a sql data base. We even had issues trying to write to a common text file. If the file is open by someone else you have issues. So we though about creating a copy local to each system and merge items together. For a part number system that would not work, but for a logging system it did.