I am a work study student working with a non-profit agency in New Jersey. I have developed a scheduling tool for reserving vehicles on a per month basis through use of a protected and shared excel 2007 workbook. The file is located on the company?s server and the employees can reserve cars available from anywhere with internet access. The actual spreadsheet has thirty-one tabs that represent the days of the month, the columns represent the vehicles and the rows represent the times of the day. The users of the tool add records with their names into the tab for the month of which the vehicle needs to be reserved, and simply use the drag option to make the reservation. The tool contains rules which turn the cells different colors as to the names that are added.
An example of this tool can be found here: https://mcares.webexone.com/default.asp?link= . Click on enter as guest and the Vehicle_Template file is located in the links section. The tool works great and it is a part of the day to day operations of the agency. There are however, a few problems when it comes to the maintenance of this tool. It is very time consuming to add new vehicles to the database and to create new databases for each month of the year, which are frequent operations.
I wanted to know if there is a software program, can be open source or not or even web based, that acts the same as the excel 2007 shared spreadsheet does? It would have to be easily editable in order to add or delete protected cells and months of the year.
Also are there any Visual Basic Programming features that can be used to customize excel 2007, to make these tasks less time consuming?
I know the Open Office.otg program is highly customizable-Is this something that can be used in the same way as the excel spreadsheet and used as a platform to customize through programming?
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.