Excel in the work place

[PCRIDE]

I don't know about everyone else but I find staff in technical environments that hardly know how to use excel. I build reports, spreadsheets, summaries, make tools to do things faster but I find that a lot of people may be scared of excel or just intimated by it.

For example
There are some grueling tasks that folks are doing manually that takes HOURS... simply making a report that a user simply needs to press CTRL A, CTRL C, click on the other sheet. CTRL V and press update is hard for them??? An hours task turned into 30 seconds but they rather do this manually??? WTH!

In the office place (unless your an accountant) A lot of people just don't know how to use Office suite very well. That seems like it would be a basic skill these days...

Does anyone also experience this?

 

[Jaye7]

I agree, I only need very basic excel skills for my job yet rather than sitting on Facebook all day long I read forums, ask quetions and read the help file so that I can make my OWN life easier, if I didn't learn about excel and macro recorders I would have had to manually key over 20,000 new parts this year and over 40,000 barcodes as my work refuses to pay $700 to load the data into the system.

With 20,000 parts which with safety stocks, long winded descriptions, reorder criteria's, alternates parts and alternate suppliers etc... it takes around 3 minutes to manually key one part, times that by 20,000, what a waste of my time, eyesight and rsi.

I have saved our sales department thousands of hours through creating a pricing file macro for them, a price file takes them 10-15 minutes and they have to do the files for 5 states in Australia, with my macro it takes 1-2 minutes and only 5 clicks of a mouse button and there is very little room for error, unlike when they manually do it and fail almost every time.

I would not have been able to help them without learning how to use computer software.

My computer does my work for me continously 8 hours a day and now I only spend about 1 - 2 hours doing any actual work myself, why, because I learnt basic computer skills.

 

[taurean]

I agree, I only need very basic excel skills for my job yet rather than sitting on Facebook all day long I read forums, ask quetions and read the help file so that I can make my OWN life easier, if I didn't learn about excel and macro recorders I would have had to manually key over 20,000 new parts this year and over 40,000 barcodes as my work refuses to pay $700 to load the data into the system.

With 20,000 parts which with safety stocks, long winded descriptions, reorder criteria's, alternates parts and alternate suppliers etc... it takes around 3 minutes to manually key one part, times that by 20,000, what a waste of my time, eyesight and rsi.

I have saved our sales department thousands of hours through creating a pricing file macro for them, a price file takes them 10-15 minutes and they have to do the files for 5 states in Australia, with my macro it takes 1-2 minutes and only 5 clicks of a mouse button and there is very little room for error, unlike when they manually do it and fail almost every time.

I would not have been able to help them without learning how to use computer software.

My computer does my work for me continously 8 hours a day and now I only spend about 1 - 2 hours doing any actual work myself, why, because I learnt basic computer skills.

Sample this:
I made a small macro which inserts specific number of rows based on calculation and fills the data. Manual job would take anywhere from 3 hours to 6 hours to achieve that (with errors). The macro does it in less than a minute. I was really happy that I had saved time.

The next time I saw those guys, they'd run the macro and then spend next 3 hours doing nothing.

If you are improving productivity, let others realize the value of it first!