I have an Open Office/Excel spreadsheet (some people edit using Open Office, some with Excel, so needs to remain an XLS document). In this spreadsheet there are a number of sheets and hundreds of rows in each sheet.
I know the best way to proceed would be to use a database, but management don’t like that idea (Time to build, test, retraining, quality control, backups, etc, etc)
So I want to know if its possible to have a ‘Search sheet’ in which someone types a word and it then lists all the rows containing that word (as in, copying the row to the ‘search sheet’) rather than having to use the built in search and constantly clicking ‘Next’.
Your probably thinking “WTF?” right now, and rightly so, but at least this way, the people who want to save time can do so, and the people that prefer to look through every sheet for what they are looking for can also do. Everythings the same to the people who don’t care, and no retraining moanings from management.
How about the best of both worlds and having something abstract? There are libraries around that can read XLS files, and I don’t know if you know PHP, but a simple PHP front end to the XLS document could be done. Eg. google for ‘excel_reader2.php’. You could then type in something to search for and the script will display those entries. When management recognise that its a good idea, you could use the same kind of script to convert it to a database (parse XLS doc -> populate SQL db).