Please excuse this very naive query. I can do basic HTML and edit
simple Perl scripts but I don't know where to look for help with this
question. Here goes:

Our web site is on a shared host (one of the Alabanza resellers)
running a Unix variant.

A couple of our users want to edit an Excel spreadsheet relatively real
time (not simultaneously). These users have not been sychronized in
the past, causing problems.

The users do not like my solution, which is to upload and download the
file using one of the common Perl scripts to do so. They would like
something a little more seamless running the features available in
Excel.

I have the option of using mySQL which is already installed on the
server. Is this the way to go?

Thanks -- please post suggestions on this site.

It was somewhere outside Barstow when powercat@verizon.net wrote:
[color=blue]
>I have the option of using mySQL which is already installed on the
>server. Is this the way to go?[/color]

Yes. Multi-user editing is a _very_ complex thing to implement
successfully. Excel has no support for it, so you'd be on your own.
Pretty much any database though has been designed to do this from the
start, so there's little or no extra work for you to do.

MySQL isn't my favourite database, but it's commonplace and certainly
workable.

Thanks for your reply...
[color=blue]
> Yes. Multi-user editing is a _very_ complex thing to implement
> successfully. Excel has no support for it, so you'd be on your own.[/color]

I suppose the local copy of Excel doesn't need to know a different
local copy of Excel is using the same file albeit at a different time.

The key issue for me is ease of upload/download from the web server by
the user.
[color=blue]
> MySQL isn't my favourite database, but it's commonplace and certainly
> workable.[/color]

Ah, but in my case it is already paid for.

There are a couple of products that can do this. See, for instance,
the BadBlue Excel Enterprise - http://badblue.com/helpxls.htm - that
allows workbooks to be edited online via web browsers. Charts are
supported and full interactivity with formula updated, all changes
written back to the original workbook(s) in real-time and so forth.
Downside? I'm not sure all formatting is visible to end-users in their
browsers. But the real-time interactivity works fine.