The file below is a spreadsheet designed to help acquire survey data on internet and broadband facilities that may or may not be available at the homes of Reading Mencap service users. The spreadsheet comprises two parts:

(i) a simple spreadsheet-database where each row corresponds to a record for an individual service user, noting their name, what internet-based services they normally access at their home, what devices they use to access these services, whether they have a home telephone landline, and so on, and also, if they do not have home broadband, would they like help in obtaining it.

(ii) a data-entry user form that sits above the spreadsheet that is designed to facilitate the acquiring of this data by prompting for it in an active way that adjusts the questions according to the previous answers.

Unfortunately, SharePoint and Teams multi-user co-authoring (where several users can work on the same document) is not fully supported in the case of user-form data entry for documents. Thus, the user-form version of this spreadsheet can only be used in your own storage space and in your own Excel desktop app.

You must download the user-form spreadsheet (the document internetQ.xlsm below) and save it on your own PC, where you can use it as your private spreadsheet in your desktop Excel app. (For security reasons, the downloaded file will be a ZIP file. All operating systems will be able to unzip this to extract the spreadsheet within.) Here is a link to the zipped spreadsheet.

To extract the spreadsheet from the ZIP file in Windows you should double-click the downloaded ZIP file. A folder will then open showing the contents (the single file internetQ.xlsm in this case). Then drag (or copy and paste) that spreadsheet file to a folder of your choice in your PC (not SharePoint). You can open the spreadsheet from there. Do not open the file from within the ZIP — copy or move it to a folder on your PC first, and open it from there.

On a Mac, double-clicking the ZIP file will open its contents in the same folder as the ZIP file — in that case just drag the exposed file internetQ.xlsm to a folder of your choice on your Mac (not SharePoint). Open the spreadsheet from there.

When you open the spreadsheet it will ask you whether you wish to enable scripts and macros (or some similar wording). You should say yes. Without that, the user form will not be available. The exact wording depends on your operating system. In Windows you might have to twice give permission while opening the spreadsheet: first permission to edit, and then permission to enable certain content, or words to that effect.

These private spreadsheets will then have to be merged at the end of the data collection exercise. They can be merged into the spreadsheet internetSummary.xlsx, which can be found in the Broadband channel of the COVID-19 Staff Team. This spreadsheet has no user form and so is safe to use in a sharing and co-authoring environment. Indeed, if you feel confident about being able to acquire all the information you need without the help of the user form, than you can enter data directly into this spreadsheet. Also, you can add extra data to the spreadsheet manually after you’ve used the user form, if appropriate.

You can watch a short video on using this interactive spreadsheet.