Sunday, June 23, 2013

Learning to make Macros

17/5/2013

While updating the monthly Travel & Entertainment Departmental Expenses reports which are eventually distributed amongst all the departments at Janssen I found the work quite repetitive, tiring and completely mindless because it involved a lot of formatting and pasting special values. Manually it’d take a person a good half of their day and that's if everything goes smoothly and there are no variances in the reports. I found it quite tedious and time-consuming so my mind wondered aimlessly trying to find another method of approaching this task. My mind wondered to macros and I remembered the co-op excel training we had earlier on in the year and decided to have a go at it. After a two hours of fiddling with formulas and script writing as well as help from google I was able to come up with two separate macros for the formatting and pasting of special values. It took a while but I preserved and I was left feeling satisfied that I’d saved myself a lot of time in the future.

What I learnt from this was that even though at the beginning I thought they’d be no way I’d be able to write a macro because I had very limited experience, sometimes I just have to give it a go anyway, persevere through it and I might surprise myself in the end. Also, I learnt that sometimes it could be worth it taking a few hours initially to develop something that you’d be able to do next time in the press of a button so macros are definitely your friend!



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