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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Open Thread: How are you using Excel?

Yesterday, I mentioned I'd been talking with someone who's looking at interesting things people are doing with Microsoft Excel. I talked to her again yesterday, and with her official okey-dokey, I'll virtually introduce Tralee Pearce (*waves*), a reporter from Toronto's Globe & Mail whom you might remember from a very swell article about the Hipster PDA.

So, by request -- and to help Tralee with fleshing out her fun-sounding article -- I hope you all will jump in here: What kind of cool, novel, and non-obvious stuff are you doing with Excel? What's the wildest, most obsessive, most nerdy thing you ever saw someone do with our favorite spreadsheet program?

EvilKnight's picture

I have become a VBA...

I have become a VBA guru at work just because of having to maintain Access databases. Excel has turned into my first stop for automating any work. I have done two major projects with it. One is to automate the conversion of binary data collected from turbine engine controls into nice graphs and output pdf files for quick review. This made our work faster, the original comuter program supplied by the vendor only allowed one to look and convert one parameter at a time (very slow).

The other is a workflow helper that is opened by requesters for work requests to my department. It uses forms to prompt for needed info and limits input so that it fits into our database cleanly. It uses Outlook to email others (assignees and supervisors) notices when the workscope changes or new people are assigned or removed from the work. And it updates our database automatically.

 
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