Hi,

I am looking for a user-friendly solution to temporarily fix a problem. I am in charge of an inventory. Unfortunately, I inherited an abominable mess of excel tables (and copies and copies of copies of it). My predecessor was simply copying the table after each large edit, for backup purpose, but never really managed it properly. I have an assistant, who worked with my predecessor, but is an old person without much agility with computer. Basically, this person would still use excel the way they always did before. To give you an idea: fields formatting are inconsistent (typically, dates are inputed as string without any consistancy), there is no real index to the inventory etc. Since they were both working on this, they also got confused with their own copies, and several versions of the inventory coexisted and parallely evolved... Our inventory has very low movement (actually, it can only increase, nothing gets out). Currently the problem to address is data recollection which my predecessor failed to achieve due to above mentioned issues.

First thing now is to fix the main large flat excel table we think is the up to date version, and put it out of Excel. I would like to find a system for a smooth transition to a real database in the future. It needs to look like an excel table, but to be "user-proof". Here are my requirements (or what I think they are):

• the interface should be online and allow for concurrent access (I will work on this, but my assistant also, and I do not want have to worry about simultaneous edits).
• if possible, the input and browsing interface should be mimicking a spreadsheet (for example, such as in sqlite-browser). I want my assistant to be able to sort fields, select and search data the way she was doing with excel, but without the risk of messing things unwillingly. My assistant is not going to learn SQL requests, and most of the time this is not really necessary.
• perhaps some edit protection system (like, until you have not pressed a key to unlock, you cannot change anything by hitting your keyboard unwillingly)
• A full history of each records (for each of our record, I want to be able to check all the changes that were made to it. I don't want anymore of the "Someone may have changed/deleted this record erroneously, but we don't who, when and why"). I also do not want the manual file backup to be even an option. Basically, everything should be time-reversible from the application; and I take care for disk replication in case of disk failure (which they never considered by the way).
• Each fields must enforce their format, no possiblity to enter 12 Nov. 2022 in one row, then 13/11/2022 on the other one.

I would like to run the application on a private server. Open-source would be great.

I would like something really user-friendly. My assistant is already under stress, unfortunately, due to the situation; so I want something to help us clean up things without needs of advanced skills. My idea is to have her transferring the excel content chunk by chunk, taking care of data format issues as they arise.

Is there anything like that out there ?

Best.