Some problems are so simple that they can be resolved over the phone. Other may require a few hours of effort. The aim of the Spreadsheet Doctor is to save you time by sorting out the problem before it impacts on your business and its efficiency.
A company was producing a report that required 8 Excel worksheets to be printed back-to-back. This is not a simple problem but a one-touch button was created for them to perform all of the necessary operations, including the print command. They were then shown how to duplicate this for other printers.
"This has been an invaluable exercise for us, allowing our company to create complicated financial solution proposals quickly and easily, and outputting them in a printed booklet style – fantastic, our clients love them.” – Tim Johnson, Operations Director, www.debtDr.co.uk
A local business had a spreadsheet with many contact names and addresses in it, but in a format that could not be used for mailmerging. He was charged for 1.25 hours work for a macro that would read the original spreadsheet, identify errors in the structure where data was missing and transfer each contact to a new sheet on a single row with all of the information. This converted unusable names and addresses into a valuable list of contacts which in turn will bring in more business.
"What's impressive to me was, following some inspired and quick work by Spreadsheet Doctor, I was able to see useless data converted into data with great value. Well worth the small investment." Chris Langdon www.langdonpartnership.co.uk
A company updated its daily record of production by manually entering the production values into the Day Shift and Night Shift spreadsheets. This data was transferred each morning to a main spreadsheet which was used to assess the quality and efficiency of the previous day's production. The main spreadsheet took several minutes to open and was very slow to operate. It was less than an hour's work to accelerate the opening to a few seconds, saving staff time every day thereafter.
A spreadsheet tool was created for analysing a large amount of positional data describing a road system in order to remove redundant points but leave all of the road positions within a specified distance (10 m) of the originals. This reduced the data by over 60%, enabling an existing software model to handle the data set.
A very large defence model that had taken several man-years of effort to build was missing a vital feature in its output. It would have taken several months to modify the original software to carry out the additional task. A macro was built in less than a week that analysed the model's output, in spreadsheet form, extracted the necessary data and added the missing information.
