General input/output error on shared spreadsheet

[verve]

Hello,

I'm feeling completely helpless here and would really appreciate some help:

In our company we are trying to share an excel spreadsheet between the employees. The spreadsheet lives on a drive accessible by all parties. We can see that all parties involved are included in the list of shared users, however, when one of the users tries to save the spreadsheet we get a "general input/output error".

Some more info:
-Some of us are on linux machines, others are on apple macs.
-I've tried saving the file as xls, xlsx, odf, but non of the formats made a difference.

What we need:
we want all parties to be able to view the and edit the spreadsheet simultaneously. Before anyone jumps on this, yes it dose make sense! The idea is to have the information updating live so everyone is on the same board.

What are we doing wrong here?

Thank you so much for the help!!

David

[RoryOF]

What you are proposing is TROUBLE! in very big letters.

The normal situation, when multiple users access an OpenOffice file, is that the first person to open the file "owns" the file and has read/write rights. All others only have read access. This is normal file sharing procedure. Suppose all users have equal access and User A and User B both write modifications to the file at the exact same time: how is this to be resolved? More important, User A modifies a certain parameter - he sells all the widgets in stock and updates the file. All other users only see the widget stock-level at the time they opened the file. How are they to know that the widget stock level has changed?

You must use some form of database to do this - perhaps a bulletin board system such as phpBB as used on this Forum. The problem has been solved but you must look further for a good solution for your situation - a shared spreadsheet is not the answer.

Edit: Start by researching File Synchronisation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_synchronization

[acknak]

Shared access is supposed to work, but (I believe) at minimum, the file must be ODF (.ods for spreadsheets) and older versions of OO will not work. I don't remember what the minimum required version is; OO 3.3 may be ok but it's getting pretty old now.

I'm not sure what the limitations are as far as reading/writing, but I would be surprised if everyone could write to the file, and if they could, if everyone would instantly see the updated file.

I've never tried it myself, so take this with a grain of salt. Oddly enough, "sharing documents" is in the OO help index but the section is completely blank.

Here's the section in the LibreOffice help:
https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Collaboration

[verve]

what i was describing is something that's done in gdocs (gmail) using the gdrive effortlessly and without errors.

We have been doing this in our company successfully for years. Not only can you see LIVE what someone else is inputting, but it will also warn you if you are about to overwrite someone else's input (something that almost never happens because you can see data being inputed live, meaning you need to have a pretty bad attention span to not notice you're about to overwrite someone).

Furthermore, this is a spreadsheet thats edited seldomly, so conflict is rare and nearly impossible. The purpose of this spreadsheet is so everyone is on the same page rather so that everyone can input data (although it is necessary for everyone involved to input some data from time to time).

Due to security reasons gdrive is being removed from our servers. This is very disappointing as now I know for a fact that openoffice doesnt have nearly as much capabilities as gdocs do on the gdrive.

sad disappointed face...

[verve]

Shared access is supposed to work, but (I believe) at minimum, the file must be ODF (.ods for spreadsheets) and older versions of OO will not work. I don't remember what the minimum required version is; OO 3.3 may be ok but it's getting pretty old now.

I'm not sure what the limitations are as far as reading/writing, but I would be surprised if everyone could write to the file, and if they could, if everyone would instantly see the updated file.

I've never tried it myself, so take this with a grain of salt. Oddly enough, "sharing documents" is in the OO help index but the section is completely blank.

Here's the section in the LibreOffice help:
https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Collaboration

Ive gone through that page. Thanks. It is basic in information and really doesnt go into any detail, in particular what to do with different operating systems trying to access/edit/write the same spreadsheet. Judging by the first reply I'm realizing that this software simply isn't as powerful as others out there for such needs as online sharing..