How to ensure all steps in form gets completed in order

Question

I have an Excel spreadsheet which must be converted to a workflow. The spreadsheet is simply used for our employees to follow a certain order while doing specific tasks. There are roughly 20 steps per task and each task must be performed in order with the approval of two people to ensure each step was completed successfully.

Ideally I would like something like this. [x] in my case would be a checkbox.

Step #1 [x] (first reviewer) [x] (second reviewer)
Step #2 [x] (first reviewer) [x] (second reviewer)
Step #3 [x] (first reviewer) [x] (second reviewer)

In order to be able to complete step #2, step #1 would have to have two checks. How can I implement something like this in SharePoint? I'm using SharePoint Designer 2007 and can not use custom code.

Answer 1

That's pretty easy. I would start by reading this article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc627286(office.12).aspx

Then design your workflow. What you want to do is create the approval for both reviewers and then have a step that waits until the previous approvals have been completed before firing off approvals to the next set of reviewers.

In SharePoint 2010 this is even easier and doesn't require SPD at all. You can simply create an Approval Workflow and then add multiple steps to it. Each step would wait for the preceding step before processing and if at any point a reviewer does not approve, the entire workflow is cancelled.