Hi virsojour,

What kind of inventories are you working with (eg individual furniture/machinery items or bulk items like stationery)? For either kind of inventory, it is undesirable to allow every user to simply add/delete inventory items on their own workbooks without some form of control over what can be added/deleted. if you don't have such controls, that can cause problems when differrent users describe the same items in different ways. For example, generating a consolidated inventory becomes very difficult.

For an inventory of individual items, you need to have a master list with a lookup table from which users can select item types to add/delete records as items are acquired disposed of. For an inventory of bulk items, it's best to have all items listed in a 'master' workbook only and to only allow the users to adjust their quantities.

The above considerations dictate the way data from the different workbooks should be linked. In both cases, the master lists of inventory items should reside in a 'master' workbook, to which the other workbooks are linked. There is no need to use macros for this part - it's simply a matter of using formulae to link the data in both sets of workbooks. For an inventory of individual items, the master workbook would require a macro that can interrogate the users' workbooks and tally the data for each defined item - the users' workbooks wouldn't require any macros. This updating could be done periodically, and wouldn't need all the workbooks to be constantly accessible via a network. For an inventory of bulk items, each users' workbook would require a macro that would update the quantities in the master workbook as items are moved into/out of store. It also means either setting up 'trusted locations' for these workbooks, or requiring users to enable macros whenever they open their inventory workbooks. This would only be practical if all the workbooks are constantly accessible via a network - otherwise, no one could be sure of what quantities were in stock at any time.

As you can see, we haven't even started with the coding yet - it's all a matter of getting the structure sorted out first. Mind you, once you get the inventory structure and management issues sorted out, you might also quite reasonably conclude that a database program like Access would be better suited to your needs - and you wouldn't need any macros.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]