Macros and Templates Will Save You Hours a Day
I just finished a training/consulting session with three officers from the US Air Force. It was so invigorating to work with this small team on their laptops with their own work. Each one had work they dreaded doing, and I was charged with helping them find a better way (my specialty).
After asking all the right, probing questions about how they worked and why they did it a certain way, one thing became clear: templates (a base document with consistent formatting) and macros (recording of screen and mouse actions to play back at will when you click a button or use a key combination) will save hours every day.
Let me make this clear: you can go from spending long, miserable hours doing tedious work to clicking a button, you’re done!
I discovered that in order for them to produce the many reports they needed, they were spending way too much time cutting, pasting, moving, resizing, redesigning documents (mostly Excel spreadsheets using data downloaded from the server), and distributing them to appropriate personnel.
The following improvements were made.
- Created document templates that are pre-formatted with all the design elements (colors, headers/footers, etc.) that will make each report consistent.
- Created a new default Excel chart with pre-formatted colors, font choices, etc., so there will be no need for redesign each time.
- Recorded macros that will combine all the steps taken to create each report and assign it to a button that resides inside the template. Tweak the macro with Visual Basic programming as needed to add special commands not possible during the recording.
- Improved macros to create either mail-merged documents or email messages that will be automatically distributed with the click of a button.
You can save hours if you put software you already have to work. If your day ends long before your feeling of accomplishment and you want more free time, you’re going to have to stop long enough to make some changes. You have to learn which button to click!
Contact me if you have a budget and need help…I’ll travel to you or you can come to me.
What do you want to have more time to do?
PEACE.
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Peggy Duncan, Time Management Expert
Filed under: Personal Productivity, Word-Excel-PowerPoint
