I need some computer help in figuring something out, so I'm hoping someone here has some ideas.

The background is that a few months ago my daughters and I started keeping a record of how much time we practiced at the piano. We would have a contest each week, with the player with the most practice time getting to pick a family activity for that weekend. I let it be known that if I won the family activity would be pulling weeds or cleaning the house, which motived my daughters to practice more!

I made a Word table log, printed it out, and kept it by the piano to record the minutes. Then my mother-in-law wanted in on it. And then one of my son's friends wanted in on it. Then my husband. And now my sister. They each call me or e-mail me to tell me how many minutes to credit them on my log.

As you might imagine, this is getting a bit unwieldy. It's also less fun for those not in my household because they can't see how others are doing.

I'd like to set up some on-line record or journal or log that each player could access and record their own minutes. Does anyone have any idea how I might do something like this? Is a weblog the answer, do you think?

First, if you are keeping track of data, Excel is a much better choice than Word.

Excel was designed for manipulating data, for Word, the data manipulation functions are an afterthought and work like an afterthought.

In most current versions of Excel, there is an item on the File menu, "Save as Web Page". I've never used that, but I'd explore it a bit and see what you can come up with.

Failing that, keep the data in Excel, but you can copy and paste it into FrontPage to publish it as viewable (not modifiable) HTML. Or if you have Acrobat Distiller, publish your Excel file as PDF and post that on your web site.

Aren't you supposed to be at "work"

I'm on my Coffee (Room) Break.

:D

I played around with the "Save as Web Page" command, and included the option to be able to edit the table in IE.

It creates an HTML file, I can open it in IE, and change stuff, but I don't see any way to save the changes.

I have now far exceeded my expertise on the topic.

I'd try the CR -- there are more people there, and you might get some more ideas. I'd also try a more pointed topic title, like "How do I share data on a web page?"

See you there.

-pj

Cindy - I just took an on-line course on PowerPoint and I know you can link a table in Excel to a PowerPoint Presentation and then when you update the Excel Spreadsheet or Access DataBase it automatically updates Powerpoint.. Now given that you can save PowerPoint as a web presentation I imagine you can do what you want to do. If everyone had a copy of the Excel spreadsheet and they were all linked to the same PP Web Presentation you should be able to all update and view it the changes and everyone's data through PP. Having said all that I don't pretend to be an expert. I only did these things as part of the class. You need someone close to you who is really good at this stuff. I imagine once you get it set up it would be pretty self-winding. What a cool idea! I'll ask my sis and brother-in-law. They do a lot of this stuff.

MS Word is adept at handling the simple kind of table you're talking about. It can perform simple arithmetic operations on the table data if you'd like.

Excel seems to be computational overkill for your needs and, to me, is clunkier to work with than MS Word for what you appear to need

You might want to consider simply attaching the MS Word (or Excel) table to an E-mail to all participants or maybe simply cut and paste the table into the body of the E-mail itself (especially if you use Outlook or Outlook Express).

Should the table have columns for the respective participants entries? Or should each participant label the table with his/her name to indicate the entries are his/hers? Your choice. In any event, each participant simply E-mails updated Tables when appropriate.

Just a thought.

Teachum's "sis" weighing in here:
I'd recommend a simple Excel spreadsheet. Create a column for each person (across the top) and a row for dates (along the side). Just have each person log their time by date, and create a total line for each person. If you'd like to get fancier, you can create pivot tables, create graphs, charts, whatever! That you could import into PowerPoint, however, that's way overkill for home use!
Happy computing!

Adding more:
Since you want to "collaborate" on this spreadsheet, you can either email it around (not easy to keep in sync) or do an internet search for a site that gives you some free space to store documents. I haven't used anything like this recently, but at one time, there were a couple of services out there that allowed limited space for this type of thing. They allow you to define users to the workspace that have view or update rights.

you might need a backend database, with front end table where each cell related to an action to send the data to the database. it could be too complicated for you to do it unless you know web programming stuff, and a database capacity (on server) associated with your website.