Hi friends - Good afternoon to all.
Sorry if this marks the commencement of amateur-hour here on MrExcel.com, but I'm a rookie and a first-time-poster long-time-reader, so I'd be incredibly grateful if someone could hook me up with some knowledge. I have a problem that's been gnawing at me for about 18 months now, and the only forum that I knew to turn to is MrExcel, because it seems like you guys are the cream of the crop in terms of Excel/Office wizardry.
I have a CRM system at work [BD Vision (BDV) is the application], that I log meetings / calls with clients. When logging these events, about 85% of the fields need to be changed to the exact same inputs each and every time given the client that is involved (what other colleagues need to be alerted to the convo, what other attendees need to be added to meeting invites, etc.), and it takes me about 32 clicks of the mouse to enter these same $%&#ing inputs each time. Pardon my symbolized language, but this, in all honesty, is the bane of my existence, particularly because I do this for everything that I do, on top of everything that my two partners do; with both partners being about as tech savvy as my greyhound Amos (with all due respect he's pretty decent at working with pivot tables...). The monumental waste of time that this represents is eating away at my brain, and has caused me to obsessively calculate all the activities that I could do in my life with all the minutes, hours, days, YEARS that I've wasted with these menial tasks, rather than actually take the time to solve the issue. I've tried to learn on my own, but have failed many times and given up. This is why I'm turning to .
When logging these actions in BDV, there's an option to create an Outlook calendar invite after logging this, and there's also a clunky add-in for Outlook that allows it to you to do the reverse, logging actions/meetings from an email or from an Outlook appt you've created, and also BDV allows for pretty customizable datadumps to Excel, so I'm assuming the Office applications "talk" relatively fluidly with BDV. I honestly have very little idea what that means for the feasibility of what I'm trying to accomplish, or whether that means I can use VBA between these two apps but I'd like to be able to create a better add-in to be able to execute these processes more fluidly, and save myself millions of clicks.
The ultimate goal, is to be able to work off of my contact list in Excel, to be able to do everything from Excel, pulling names, email addresses, related contacts (who would need to be on invites for each person), etc., to create a completely fluid process from Excel to BDV/Outlook, or from an Outlook appt that automatically pulls this data from Excel (or BDV, which I can update manually to reflect the Excel data) to create appts / emails which then are automatically logged in BDV with the correct inputs automatically selected if I click a certain "client A" macro button in Outlook.
Essentially, I want to know whether this is possible (can I create a button that interacts with all 3 or simply an Office app and a non-Office app), to start, and if so, where do I begin, what programming language would be best to execute this, am I sane, etc.
Please tell me if this is unclear, because it may not be given the mental state I'm in; I'm writing this after a day in which I spent over 7 hours simply logging actions/meetings because everyone at my firm is more concerned with the rat-race of CYAs (making it seem like they're doing more significant work than they are by making sure they have logged more actions than the next person) than actually spending time on revenue-generating. This is compounded by the fact that I'm responsible for logging my partners' actions as well.
If I don't streamline these inefficiencies in my day-to-day soon, my mind will officially turn into pudding. Please help in any way you can, whether that be directing me to other forums, sending me a bottle of single-malt, or giving me any guidance or ideas that you may have. PS. I'm using Office 2010.
Thanks to all and have a great day.
Best regards,
bp
Sorry if this marks the commencement of amateur-hour here on MrExcel.com, but I'm a rookie and a first-time-poster long-time-reader, so I'd be incredibly grateful if someone could hook me up with some knowledge. I have a problem that's been gnawing at me for about 18 months now, and the only forum that I knew to turn to is MrExcel, because it seems like you guys are the cream of the crop in terms of Excel/Office wizardry.
I have a CRM system at work [BD Vision (BDV) is the application], that I log meetings / calls with clients. When logging these events, about 85% of the fields need to be changed to the exact same inputs each and every time given the client that is involved (what other colleagues need to be alerted to the convo, what other attendees need to be added to meeting invites, etc.), and it takes me about 32 clicks of the mouse to enter these same $%&#ing inputs each time. Pardon my symbolized language, but this, in all honesty, is the bane of my existence, particularly because I do this for everything that I do, on top of everything that my two partners do; with both partners being about as tech savvy as my greyhound Amos (with all due respect he's pretty decent at working with pivot tables...). The monumental waste of time that this represents is eating away at my brain, and has caused me to obsessively calculate all the activities that I could do in my life with all the minutes, hours, days, YEARS that I've wasted with these menial tasks, rather than actually take the time to solve the issue. I've tried to learn on my own, but have failed many times and given up. This is why I'm turning to .
When logging these actions in BDV, there's an option to create an Outlook calendar invite after logging this, and there's also a clunky add-in for Outlook that allows it to you to do the reverse, logging actions/meetings from an email or from an Outlook appt you've created, and also BDV allows for pretty customizable datadumps to Excel, so I'm assuming the Office applications "talk" relatively fluidly with BDV. I honestly have very little idea what that means for the feasibility of what I'm trying to accomplish, or whether that means I can use VBA between these two apps but I'd like to be able to create a better add-in to be able to execute these processes more fluidly, and save myself millions of clicks.
The ultimate goal, is to be able to work off of my contact list in Excel, to be able to do everything from Excel, pulling names, email addresses, related contacts (who would need to be on invites for each person), etc., to create a completely fluid process from Excel to BDV/Outlook, or from an Outlook appt that automatically pulls this data from Excel (or BDV, which I can update manually to reflect the Excel data) to create appts / emails which then are automatically logged in BDV with the correct inputs automatically selected if I click a certain "client A" macro button in Outlook.
Essentially, I want to know whether this is possible (can I create a button that interacts with all 3 or simply an Office app and a non-Office app), to start, and if so, where do I begin, what programming language would be best to execute this, am I sane, etc.
Please tell me if this is unclear, because it may not be given the mental state I'm in; I'm writing this after a day in which I spent over 7 hours simply logging actions/meetings because everyone at my firm is more concerned with the rat-race of CYAs (making it seem like they're doing more significant work than they are by making sure they have logged more actions than the next person) than actually spending time on revenue-generating. This is compounded by the fact that I'm responsible for logging my partners' actions as well.
If I don't streamline these inefficiencies in my day-to-day soon, my mind will officially turn into pudding. Please help in any way you can, whether that be directing me to other forums, sending me a bottle of single-malt, or giving me any guidance or ideas that you may have. PS. I'm using Office 2010.
Thanks to all and have a great day.
Best regards,
bp
