When I was still teaching undergraduate intro biz-stat (among that community it 
is always
abbreviated), we needed to control the spreadsheet behaviour of TAs who entered 
marks into
a spreadsheet. We came up with TellTable (the Sourceforge site is still around 
with refs
at http://telltable-s.sourceforge.net/), which put openoffice calc on a server 
and made
sure change recording was on and the menu to switch off change recording was 
removed. It
is used over a web browser with a VNC client. Neil Smith wrote a Java 
application to view
all the changes by who, what, when etc., and we discovered the infrastructure 
was quite
nice for running any single user app in a shared mode with version control. 
However, with
Google Docs, we realized we could try to make money or enjoy life, and so the 
project is
now moribund. However, the ideas are there, and if anyone gets interested, I'll 
be happy
to try to dig up materials, though I suspect that it would be easier to work 
with the
ideas and more modern tools.

The key idea is that there is just ONE master file, and that there is some 
discipline over
keeping that file OK. My opinion is that this concept could be exploited much 
more for
lots of different situations, but it seems that cloud technology is being used 
to create
lots of versions of files rather than consolidate and control such files.

JN


On 03/03/2012 06:00 AM, r-help-requ...@r-project.org wrote:
> Message: 76
> Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 20:04:05 -0500
> From: jim holtman <jholt...@gmail.com>
> To: Greg Snow <538...@gmail.com>
> Cc: r-help <r-help@r-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [R] Cleaning up messy Excel data
> Message-ID:
>       <caaxdm-6vzxcli4mr0gukwge5eva0-gx03fruey9ej3cajy4...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Unfortunately they only know how to use Excel and Word.  They are not
> folks who use a computer every day.  Many of them run factories or
> warehouses and asking them to use something like Access would not
> happen in my lifetime (I have retired twice already).
> 
> I don't have any problems with them "messing" up the data that I send
> them; they are pretty good about making changes within the context of
> the spreadsheet.  The other issue is that I working with people in
> twenty different locations spread across the US, so I might be able to
> one of them to use Access (there is one I know that uses it), but that
> leaves 19 other people I would not be able to communicate with.

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