Sarcalogos
New Member
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2016
- Messages
- 1
Hi guys,
I'm totally new to this forum, so please be gentle. To cut to the chase, my wife runs a small home business where she runs sales on specific items, selling anywhere between 5-20ish items at a time. She runs a new sale every 2 weeks. With each sale, she typically has somewhere around 300-500 different girls that place orders to buy from her. The marketing and communication is all filtered through a facebook site. So, she posts a picture album for the current sale and posts photos of each individual item she is selling. Girls will comment on the photos and say "i want 2 of this or 5 of that" or whatever. Throughout the duration of the sale, she will monitor new comments and create an excel database. So, she'll review one picture from her current album and maybe document:
Sally Johnson
-1 ea. Tank Top - Black - Medium
Tara Smith
-1 ea. Tank Top - Red - Small
-2 ea. Tank Top - Pink - Large
So she'll go through and compile a huge list of all the girls ordering Tank Tops, including the customizations (sometimes she may have an option to have a persons last name printed on the shirt, for example), size, color, etc.
After she tallies up all 300 people that ordered tank tops...she moves on to her next item in her sale album, lets say it's a personalized keychain. So...now she creates a new document to start tallying up each person that ordered personalized keychains.
Andrea Reed
-1 ea Key Chain - Gold - Cheerleader For Life - 8 inch
Sally Johnson
-1ea Key Chain - Silver - Mom Life - 8 inch
After she does this for each photo, she will have a bunch of separate spreadsheets for each item. Some girls have bought multiple items. In my example above, Sally Johnson now has a spot on the Tank Top spreadsheet and the Key Chain spreadsheet. So, at this point, my wife has it down pretty good and filters each document and can fairly quickly go through and combine all these spreadsheets to total each persons entire order, so she can go back to "Sally Johnson" and tell her that she owes $25.00 total ($15.00 for her shirt and $10.00 for her keychain).
The problem is, it's not usually just one or two items. Sometimes we have girls buying 40 or 50 items at a time. It gets very burdensome quickly. Typically around 1500 rows of data that she currently compiles, then goes through and manually adds up how much each individual person owes her.
I know there has got to be an easier way! I thought I was savvy enough to figure it out, but, i'm running in to some roadblocks. I envision creating a master database that has each persons name that ever buys from her (regardless of whether or not they are buying from her this week or not..if they've ever bought from her, their name stays on the list). I then envision entering each persons order from left to right, all in one row, spread over multiple columns. I imagine, from left to right (A1 to Z1, or whatever is required) i will have the Persons Name, the item they ordered, custom information about the item, quantity of that item ordered, price, etc. Then continue on with item 2, item 3, item 4...etc.
I want this master document to dump that information into a separate document that is formatted to be a bit more presentable, she currently provides her "totals" document to her group on the facebook page, so any girl on the page can pull up her document and see their entire order summarized, price included and their name is alphabetical on the list. So, i would like to be able to have my huge database be able to be compressed, formatted and organized conditionally as i choose. I tried using Microsoft Word and the mail-merge feature...but, realized quickly that aside from the ****ty formatting issues that you run in to when using word, there weren't options to "not dump data if cell is empty".
I realize this is a huge question and I have probably only created more questions than i will get answers. But, if anyone feels they have at least a suggestion of where to start or anything to offer at all...please, i'm looking for a discussion that is eventually going to lead me to my answer.
Thanks for your help,
Alex.
I'm totally new to this forum, so please be gentle. To cut to the chase, my wife runs a small home business where she runs sales on specific items, selling anywhere between 5-20ish items at a time. She runs a new sale every 2 weeks. With each sale, she typically has somewhere around 300-500 different girls that place orders to buy from her. The marketing and communication is all filtered through a facebook site. So, she posts a picture album for the current sale and posts photos of each individual item she is selling. Girls will comment on the photos and say "i want 2 of this or 5 of that" or whatever. Throughout the duration of the sale, she will monitor new comments and create an excel database. So, she'll review one picture from her current album and maybe document:
Sally Johnson
-1 ea. Tank Top - Black - Medium
Tara Smith
-1 ea. Tank Top - Red - Small
-2 ea. Tank Top - Pink - Large
So she'll go through and compile a huge list of all the girls ordering Tank Tops, including the customizations (sometimes she may have an option to have a persons last name printed on the shirt, for example), size, color, etc.
After she tallies up all 300 people that ordered tank tops...she moves on to her next item in her sale album, lets say it's a personalized keychain. So...now she creates a new document to start tallying up each person that ordered personalized keychains.
Andrea Reed
-1 ea Key Chain - Gold - Cheerleader For Life - 8 inch
Sally Johnson
-1ea Key Chain - Silver - Mom Life - 8 inch
After she does this for each photo, she will have a bunch of separate spreadsheets for each item. Some girls have bought multiple items. In my example above, Sally Johnson now has a spot on the Tank Top spreadsheet and the Key Chain spreadsheet. So, at this point, my wife has it down pretty good and filters each document and can fairly quickly go through and combine all these spreadsheets to total each persons entire order, so she can go back to "Sally Johnson" and tell her that she owes $25.00 total ($15.00 for her shirt and $10.00 for her keychain).
The problem is, it's not usually just one or two items. Sometimes we have girls buying 40 or 50 items at a time. It gets very burdensome quickly. Typically around 1500 rows of data that she currently compiles, then goes through and manually adds up how much each individual person owes her.
I know there has got to be an easier way! I thought I was savvy enough to figure it out, but, i'm running in to some roadblocks. I envision creating a master database that has each persons name that ever buys from her (regardless of whether or not they are buying from her this week or not..if they've ever bought from her, their name stays on the list). I then envision entering each persons order from left to right, all in one row, spread over multiple columns. I imagine, from left to right (A1 to Z1, or whatever is required) i will have the Persons Name, the item they ordered, custom information about the item, quantity of that item ordered, price, etc. Then continue on with item 2, item 3, item 4...etc.
I want this master document to dump that information into a separate document that is formatted to be a bit more presentable, she currently provides her "totals" document to her group on the facebook page, so any girl on the page can pull up her document and see their entire order summarized, price included and their name is alphabetical on the list. So, i would like to be able to have my huge database be able to be compressed, formatted and organized conditionally as i choose. I tried using Microsoft Word and the mail-merge feature...but, realized quickly that aside from the ****ty formatting issues that you run in to when using word, there weren't options to "not dump data if cell is empty".
I realize this is a huge question and I have probably only created more questions than i will get answers. But, if anyone feels they have at least a suggestion of where to start or anything to offer at all...please, i'm looking for a discussion that is eventually going to lead me to my answer.
Thanks for your help,
Alex.
