MS Office project right for the job?

[lostplanet]

i have been tasked by a friend who has an surveying and civil engineering company to try to come up with a solution to there manual paperwork system.

at the moment they use simple excel documents for tracking engineers and up date them manually by talking over the phone.

i have been looking at microsoft project 2003 and project server 2003.

what i would like to be able to do is have the two people in the office see and control whats going on for the engs in the field. there PC's are already networked but they dont have a server.

engineers have laptops with 3G cards for comms. at the end of each day they need to send all data expenses, hours etc to the office for organisation there.

they can send email data excel sheets via outlook to the office but ideally i would like that data to automatically update/overwrite the info for that job as i arrives.

they are a young small company and cannot afford to waste money on £500 to £1000 if it will not do what they need.

so i'd like to know if i need the server component to make project work for them?

is project configurable enough to make it do as i want?

any suggestions on alternatives?

[Force Flow]

Well, here's a demonstration of it: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HA101672711033.aspx

You might be able to see better if it'll work for you. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an actual trial version.

[lostplanet]

thanks i got the demo, but i cant see how excel worksheets can be integrated.
it keeps mentioning the server component.

im looking at 'dotproject' at the moment. my sister has had some training with MSP so i will chat to her about it tonite.

if the engineers fill out a form daily(which the office needs) is it possible to merge all 5 documents into one and automatically add all the fields together for a total for the week? and then get the totals displayed somewhere maybe in project.

[mairving]

Project would probably work but it is a royal pain to setup and can be difficult to use plus fairly expensive. If they are using Excel docs it might be easier to setup Sharepoint but again that might be overkill.

[lostplanet]

thanks guys, i spoke with my sister and she thinks that project would be useful but not for what im trying to acheicve.

seems like excel can be manipulated to do pretty much what i want but will take some brain power to work out the formulas needed. so here i go..

anyone know of a good tutorial site for excel with forums for support?