The idea is that the program I'm writting is a rota sheet (in very basic terms) for use by many people in one company. I don't know a great deal about how servers and netwroks work, but I'm assuming the program when finished will be stored on a central drive and used by different offices on the network.

So i think that there will be several excels running their own office rota workbook at any particular time. The macro I've been querying needs to edit another offices rota workbook whether it is open or not.
So i don't think I have a way round this one, but if you have any ideas, i'd be really pleased to hear them
many thanks for your help on this, i've been pulling my hair out on this one for a few days now.