Who Needs To Read This Article?

You will find this article of considerable reading value, if you belong to at least ONE of the following spreadsheet user categories: Owners of Small Businesses - Restaurants/Bars, Hotels, Hospitals, Factories, Consultants etc; Decision Makers/Job Holders in Corporations - Materials Managers, Sales/Marketing Analysts, Financial Analysts/Accountants, Project Engineers; And Anyone desiring to make BETTER sense - and use - of data!

Spreadsheet Automation Facilitates EFFORTLESS Data Handling, Analysis & Report Generation!

Sometimes people don't really care about learning(or using) all the "cool' advanced functions, formulas and techniques in the spreadsheet application they use for their work. They just want to punch in their relevant raw data - at any time - and immediately see the computed results generated by the spreadsheet in a manner that can facilitate their important decision making.

At times, they would prefer to click a button that says "Print ABC", or "Print XYZ" report, instead of having to crawl all over the huge spreadsheet(and get "lost" every now and then), to highlight and print different report pages. Using a custom built data entry form to make data entries into 14 different cells in different parts of a table(at the same time/with one click) would, for them, be "heaven" compared to making the entries one at a time.

This article is meant for those individuals/businesses who sometimes experience a need to use their spreadsheets in the (somewhat "impersonal"?) manner described above, to get the results they want. That need would often arise out of their lack of requisite skills to get the spreadsheet to behave the way they want - or limited time to devote towards incorporating necessary automation to make it do so.

In my article titled You Can Increase Your Profits Without Changing Your Prices, I ended with the following summary:

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If You Remember Nothing Else, Remember The Following:

1. One good way to maintain and/or significantly increase your profits without raising your prices, is to reduce your Variable Costs(VCs).

2. You can reduce your variable costs by marketing more efficiently (getting more customers at lesser cost, AND maintaining them at lower expense). I once read an article that proposed a new parameter COCS: Cost Of Customers Sold or Served). This could be adopted as a Key Performance Indicator(KPI).

3. You can also reduce your variable costs by innovating more(i.e. developing greater efficiency in your routine internal operations and/or product/service delivery). That way, you would be able to produce/deliver more products and/or services with less effort, in less time, and using less resources. All of these would imply LOWER expenses/costs, leading to INCREASED profit retention per unit of product/service sold.

4. There is saying that: "You cannot manage something, if you do not measure it. Nor can you measure it, if you do not record it". Spreadsheet tracking will help you conveniently implement and sustain the process of monitoring, controlling and/or reducing your VCs. You will need to do this so as to constantly evaluate progress of your VC monitoring/control and reduction initiatives.

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A DIFFERENT Type Of Automation

The approach to spreadsheet automation that I refer to, is one that seeks to provide functional spreadsheet automation alternatives for ANY spreadsheet user task(s). Typically, solutions like this would require the developer to study existing manual data recording, analysis and report generation systems, then plan - in consultation with users - for incorporation of automation into the spreadsheet to replace them, where possible.

Custom spreadsheet solutions which survive long after the developer has "left the scene", are often those which users accept because they discover it - among other benefits - makes their work quicker and easier to do. That is why the best person to develop such solutions tend to be one who works in that area, and is therefore familiar with the way the manual system operates. S/he would have an "insider's" perspective of the best way to introduce automation other users will readily adopt - even as it solves the identified problem(s).

In effect what I am saying is that companies which get the most value from spreadsheet automation(including using it to avoid expenditure on less adaptable commercial off the shelf applications) will be those which empower their users to routinely generate "in house" solutions. In such companies, you will find that only when the requirement becomes considerably specialised or complex, does the IT department get called upon to develop or purchase software solutions for user departments or functions with significant data recording and analysis needs.

So, (when considering the automation I speak about) do not think about spreadsheet documents containing one or two click-able buttons that allow a user print a page or copy some cells from one sheet to another. Instead, I want you to picture an application(or Entreprise Information System) that customises the appearance of your spreadsheet workspace(to take advantage of maximum screen capital available on your PC), and offers you custom "floating" data entry forms.

In addition, visualise it having dynamic query/report drop menu interfaces, and a variety of custom buttons: for navigation(within and between worksheets), printing, data export (as PDF documents or spreadsheet files), saving, auto-data filtering, auto-charts plotting, auto-backup of files, user login authentication (for documents with sensitive or confidential content) etc.

To experience the type of automation I refer to, you can email FREE demos of sample automated Excel VB driven spreadsheet applications like (1) a Training Tracking Database