Hi folks,



I work in an office that might have 18 different users over the course of the month, on different computers. We all have Office 2010, and can access the same files via our 'shared drive' on the network, which gets automatically backed up daily i believe. We work with 8 clients who live in our residential unit for three months, and we need to write casenotes after each shift.

For any particular client, could we all use the same document in Word? I'd like it if we ended up with one big growing file, that couldn't be altered once written, but could be added to after each shift.

I'm not sure if it is possible ... is there some way that Staff A could come on, write a paragraph of notes, and then have Staff B do the next shift, write his notes, and somehow append it to the previous file, but not edit the previous file?

Perhaps they need to 'digitally sign it' so that we know who wrote the notes, and then save a read-only copy so that it wouldn't get altered in the future ...
Or maybe they don't need to 'digitally sign' it, as long as they type in their name at the end of their shift notes, then save a read-only copy.

BUT can a new worker then write more, and append it??

Hopefully I've sufficiently described what I want to happen. I'd far prefer to use Word rather than having us all to wade through handwritten notes!

thank very much for your advice!

Hi
You could achieve this by setting up a document for each client that is updated by each Shift that comes on duty.
You could then use the Master and Sub Document Functionality to bring it into one document. Using this functionality users can still access the individual documents as and when they need to.
Hope this helps.
Tony

Hi Tony,

thanks, I tried playing around with Master/Sub ('inserting sub documents').

However I've realized that after a user writes a shift-note, they can then protect it ... but this is done by creating the password. Therefore they will always be able to go back and alter the document in the future. I don't actually want this -- we need it to be written once, then protected from future changes by anyone.

I'm starting to think this is just not possible with Word :-(

If you value your work, stay away from Word's master/sub document feature. See:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/Wh...ocsCorrupt.htm
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm
http://www.addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm

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

> If you value your work …

And your sanity ;-} Oh, the howls of woe as colleagues opened yesterday's work today only to be confronted with the FUD message "this file is probably corrupt". That was fifteen or so years (and several contracts) ago, and they moved to another product; don't know whether they've moved back since.

Hi
Don't despair, send me a sample layout to otpm@blueyonder.co.uk and I will work on something. It may be next week before I get back to you though.
Tony