So I have two coworkers who I want to help out with a problem. They have to collaborate on upgrades in a old factory, and they both use the same excel spreadsheet to keep track of the to-do list.
However. This will routinely cause one of them to lose all their work for the day when the other person forgets to close the spreadsheet after doing something.
They are great people. But computers are not their strength. So just reminding them to never start working before checking if the other person is done will not really work. And I always gets asked to help out since I know the basics of excel at least.
So is there anything that can be used for project management, and that has real time collaboration. And can be learned to two people who dislike computers in general.
Maybe google sheets? Or if there is an excel online equivalent
That would at least mean their work is synced so it doesn’t matter if they forget to log out or edit at the same time
There does indeed seem to be a excel equivalent. I forgot to check that before posting the question. I will check with IT if we have excel online available. Thanks.
Current 365 Excel let’s multiple people edit and auto save
Yes there’s software for this, but I think you can keep it simpler than that.
Just tell them to create a new spreadsheet every day (possibly by creating a copy of yesterday’s spreadsheet). Obviously name the files by date. With a new directory for each month.
Also, it sounds like they don’t have good backups. Help them with that.
Office365 Excel documents offer realtime cloud syncing, but at a minimum I believe autosave is a standard feature in Excel now as well. Enabling one or both should rectify pretty quickly and seems like the lowest-tech solution for them.
Great. That might be the best option since they are already somewhat familiar with excel. Thanks for the suggestion.
I wouldn’t recommend it. If checking if someone else has finished work first is too much to ask, dealing with passwords/two factor auth/etc isn’t gonna go down well.
I’m going to have to talk to IT to see if there is a foolproof way of doing it.
This has to be some of the most common issues with modern workplaces. Getting the old school people to get used to the modern tools. They’re both great people. But they would rather work with purely mechanical stuff instead of computers, sadly for them, factories these days require both.
Is it on a network share? Excel has sharing support built in. When turning on sharing, there is an option to auto save and reload at a specific interval. It will also keep a history of changes for a configurable number of days.
Will be the open source alternative.