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I have made an excel spreadsheet for membership information for a club. I want to make cd's that I can mail to individual club secretaries that can be filled out with the required information (members' names, addresses, etc.) and then returned to me to compile into one document. The disk needs to be readable by both PCs and MACs. I have made the spreadsheet on a MAC using Microsoft Excel:mac 2008. What type of CD to I need to buy to duplicate the blank spreadsheet that I created and also allow for data input from the individual secretaries?

Kay Southern
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  • Tbh I would ditch CDs alltogether and use some small USB flash drives. CDs requires a "burning" process, including for the modification, which is kind of slow. – Evengard May 31 '17 at 19:36
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    If you do this with CDs. you would need re-writable CDs (which are a bit more expensive than regular CDs) and the recipients would all need a computer with a CD read/***write*** drive and software that can write files back to CDs. In this day and age, that is no longer a given. Many laptops no longer have a CD drive, and not many people have or use the software to burn CDs. Have you considered posting the file on OneDrive and simply sharing it with people? Everyone can make their edits right there in the same file (at the same time) and there will be no need for consolidation. – teylyn May 31 '17 at 19:49
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    @teylyn That would expose all the member PII (names, addresses, etc) to all the other members. Possibly not a good idea, and possibly against the law in some circumstances. – DavidPostill May 31 '17 at 19:53
  • Or set up one file per individual club and share with just that secretary. – teylyn Jun 01 '17 at 04:06
  • Why not use an online spreadsheet where people have to log in? – Dave Jun 12 '17 at 14:18

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CDs are not the answer to this problem. There are several kinds of incompatible CD-RW standards and it would be normal for a recipient not to be able to rewrite the CD with new data. Instead, you should consider emailing the secretaries and asking for membership lists, or sending USB thumb drives in padded envelopes, or using Google Sheets. The latter involves more work on the secretaries' side if they've never used Google Sheets before, but is the most satisfactory method overall.

Christopher Hostage
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CDs may be a problem if the recipient has a computer without a CD drive. Also, as mentioned in the comments, you'd need re-writable CDs and the recipients would have to have software to burn files back to CDs. This sounds like overkill in this day and age.

You can set up an account for OneDrive (Microsoft) or DropBox or similar file sharing services.

If you are happy for the club secretaries to see the personal data of other clubs, publish one spreadsheet and share it with all the secretaries, who can then edit the Excel file at the same time and there will be no need for consolidating.

If you don't want clubs to see the details of the other clubs, create a file for each club, post it to the online folder and share each club's file with just that secretary. After they filled in their data you would need to consolidate the different files.

This is assuming that club secretaries have an email address, of course, but that is much more likely than them knowing how to burn CDs.

teylyn
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