HELP:- Excel collaboration with versioning and save/modify alerts?

[Captain Morgan]

A friend of mine is at the tail end of a messy divorce and has asked me how best to facilitate the split of their personal items.

The court mandated that he makes a list of all the items left in there home and they are to pick one item each until all items are claimed, with hime getting first pick. Sounds easy eh, however…

Their relationship it and communication is zero, they can’t even email each other even to say "Hey I’ve picked the glockenspiel, it your turn...", if they use the solicitors as a email conduit its £30 per email so that’s a economic blackhole, leading him to ask me how best to do it.

He needs the versioning aspect to prevent a ‘land grab’ of all the valuable items as this has already been attempted.

Now obviously he could use dropbox as this has versioning and I believe it can be set to alert when a document is saved/modified but I’m wondering if there is a better solution?

In a ideal world (other than acting like adults and using email) there would be some kind of service where you could upload a list sign up with your email and the system would allow one pick and then email the other party and lock you out until they have made their pick and go through that loop until all the items have a owner, but surprisingly as I doubt this is the first occurance I cant seem to find one .

So are there any solutions I can to suggest to him other than Dropbox?

TIA

[blackal]

Google Sheets

Set up the spreadsheet in Excel and import into Sheets. Set up sharing with his ex.

Each can work on it and update online.

Works well

[ernestrome]

Yes, Sheets keeps a version history so you can see all the changes by each user with timestamps. IIRC you can set excel to do the same vis the 'sharing' function but it isn't logging changes by default, or at least not in a way that is easily accessible by users.

[Captain Morgan]

Thanks for the pointers to Google Sheets it seems to do almost everything he wants bar the versioning not seeming to be granular enough

[blackal]

Thanks for the pointers to Google Sheets it seems to do almost everything he wants bar the versioning not seeming to be granular enough

Can't he leave each item in the list, and have a column for her picks, a column for his picks - give them red/blue fill formatting - and have 2 checksum boxes which will show if she has picked greater than 'one more than him' ? Lock cells which contain each item.

Sounds like he is operating a remove item from list - scheme?