Quick Take-Away: This article will benefit ANY business user who wishes to understand how to get more productive work done by him/herself and/or others who work with/for him/her – using spreadsheets.
My discussion is based on MS Excel, but the ideas I advocate apply to ANY spreadsheet application that offers code driven automation functionality.
Over 2 decades of industry level automated spreadsheet solutions development experience and exposure, across a wide range of industries, gives me unique insights into how spreadsheets can be maximally utilized to achieve business goals.
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Tayo Solagbade’s
Performance Improvement IDEAS
(PI Squared) Newsletter
Monday 1st August 2016
NB: This PI Squared newsletter will be published weekly, on Mondays, in place of the Speaking/Web Marketing IDEAS newsletter, starting from today – 15th February 2016. I’m reinventing my Monday newsletter content and theme, to accommodate my vision of serving the growing audience of serious minded individuals and organizations reaching out to me, with information, education. news and research findings designed to help them do what they do better.
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PII 025: What Every Business User of Spreadsheets Needs to Boost Productivity
Quick Take-Away: This article will benefit ANY business user who wishes to understand how to get more productive work done by him/herself and/or others who work with/for him/her – using spreadsheets.
My discussion is based on MS Excel, but the ideas I advocate apply to ANY spreadsheet application that offers code driven automation functionality.
Over 2 decades of industry level automated spreadsheet solutions development experience and exposure, across a wide range of industries, gives me unique insights into how spreadsheets can be maximally utilized to achieve business goals.
Indeed, as a multipreneur, I enjoy what can be called an unfair advantage over most business users of spreadsheets.
This is because I get to see DEEP into the various ways that different business users with widely differing needs in different areas of specialization, have to make use of MS Excel.
From accountants, to construction engineers, HR professionals, sales/marketing executives, research organizations, hotels, hospitals, fitness clubs, farm businesses, professional speakers/coaches, churches, consulting firms and others, the usage range is virtually limitless.
Everybody – even the housewife running a home business – has some use for MS Excel
My romance with business spreadsheets automation began while I was employed in Guinness Nigeria as a Graduate Trainee.
I’ve told various aspects of the story of my 7 year stay in that company, especially as it relates to how my spreadsheet automation skills earned me rapid career advancement, in past articles.
Here are 2 of them:
Achieve Recognition and Attract Career Advancement Opportunities By Being A Change Agent
How To Turn A Major Blunder At Work Into A Career Advancement Opportunity
For specific details of what I did, in terms of solutions that added measurable benefits to the organization, thereby earning me rewards, click here to view full details in my PDF resume.
Over the past decade since I left Guinness to develop custom Excel-VB software for a living, I have developed high profile bullet proof custom apps for clients in many of the industries mentioned earlier in this article.
One thing that has become clear to me from working closely with all these MS Excel business users during this time, both in and out of paid employment, is that 95% of them have NO CLUE that they can cut down over 60% of time and effort they spend getting their work done in that application.
In many ways the fact that this is so, is a testimony to just how powerful MS Excel is a business reporting application. That it enables people get work done, even when they are not using it half as efficiently as they can – and should….WOW!
The above is what drives me to do what I do as a Best Practice Spreadsheet Solutions Developer. I see what that 95% of users do not see. And I understand why they find it hard to see, talk less visualize it.
You see, these are business people who often have a LOT of work on their plates, constantly demanding their attention. As a result, most of them simply cannot afford the luxury of setting aside the time to explore the potential goldmine of time saving features hidden in the automation of MS Excel.
Let me be specific:
I estimate that 95% of MS Excel business users currently waste quality time, effort and resources doing routine and repetitive tasks MANUALLY in the process of using MS Excel.
For instance, most of them who have standard report generation/analysis workbooks they painstakingly build preoccupy themselves with duplicating them for daily, weekly, monthly or annual use MANUALLY – when Excel-VB code can enable them do it within seconds, instead of the hours it takes them.
But that’s even going too far. On a much simpler level of “data entry” alone, many of them are shooting themselves in the foot, daily, without even knowing it.
Many of them lose hundreds of hours crawling all over huge spreadsheets that they have to update DAILY, to generate critical decision making reports.
Yet, Excel-VB automation makes it possible to use modeless forms to retrieve data from ANY cell in ANY size of spreadsheet table, into a small single screen form interface, where changes to be made can be done without ANY need to interact directly with the cells!
Example: Below are screenshots of 2 interfaces in an Excel-VB data entry form driven version of a Bookkeeping Spreadsheet I downloaded from Accountinator.com, which I created and emailed as a demo to members of my Excel-VB club. Click here to read more about it.
Imagine how much more pleasurable it would be to do your work, when you know that the mundane task of posting updates can now be done without the stress and strain of spending time searching for, and verifying the correct cell to post your value, so as to generate a report update?
As a business decision maker, you stand to benefit more if you spend less time and energy doing such routine tasks – freeing yourself up to make more sense of the reports you end up with from posting your updates.
In other words, I am saying that many business users are working too hard to get their jobs done. And 80% of what they are doing is often NOT something that needs to be done by them – at least not manually.
Instead, they are tasks that can be turned over to Excel-VB code that will be designed to be run on demand (via mouse click) or even at time intervals or indeed based on an event occurrence.
Click here to view videos of the Poultry Farm Manager app that I sell to Farm CEOs in/out of Africa, which auto charts Hen Day Percentages and generates summaries via Excel-VB code.
These are results that would take a competent user MANY long hours to produce, with the risk of human errors added!
Simply put, business users can be more productive if they intelligently incorporate smart Excel-VB code driven automation to eliminate the routine and repetitive tasks they have to do to get their work done.
They need to find ways to eliminate mundane activities from the spreadsheet based work they do, so that more quality time and effort can be devoted to doing the things that require their conscious attention and involvement. For instance, reviewing charted data trends, against expectations through the use of dynamic menu driven controls.
If you’re not working in MS Excel as described above, that’s proof that you have room for productivity boosting improvement in the way you use MS Excel.
Or to put it differently: You need to make MS Excel do what you want, how you want it, when you want it, so YOU can get the results you want with less effort, in less time, and using less resources.
If that interests you, consider joining my Excel-VB club(you get a FREE app of your choice), or better still take up this promo offer of bundle Excel-VB software development, and coaching.
SDN Blog™
New posts from last week*
Monday:
[Tuesday]:
[Wednesday]:
[Thursday]:
[Friday]:
[MP3 Audio] The Secret to Succeeding Financially As a Service Provider
[Saturday]:
N/A
[Sunday]:
Test-Drive Tayo Solagbade’s ExcelVB Automated Floating Data Entry Form Driven Version of the Accountinator.com “Simple Bookkeeping Spreadsheet”
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Tayo K. Solagbade* Self-Development/Performance Improvement Specialist *Best Practice Farm Business Support Specialist & Founder of the MS Excel Heaven Visual Basic Automation Club and Competition Mobile: +234-803-302-1263 (in Nigeria) or +229-66-122-136 (in Benin Republic) Tayo K. Solagbade is a Location Independent Performance Improvement Specialist and Multipreneur (i.e. a highly versatile/multi-skilled entrepreneur), with a bias for delivering Best Practice solutions to Farm Businesses and others. Since 2002, he has earned multiple streams of income providing individuals and organizations with personal development training and coaching, custom MS Excel-VB solutions, web marketing systems/web hosting, freelance writing services, and best practice extension support services (for farm business owners). Tayo is the author of the Self-Development (SD) Bible™ and the popular Livestock Feed Formulation Handbook. He is also the developer of its accompanying Excel-VB driven Ration Formulator™ and the Poultry Farm Manager™ software. He has delivered talks/papers to audiences in various groups and organizations, including the Centre for Management Development, University of Lagos, Christ Baptist Church, Volunteer Corps, Tantalisers Fast Foods and others. In May 2012 he was the Guest Speaker at the Centre for Entrepreneurship Development’s Annual Semester Entrepreneurial Lecture at Yaba College of Technology in Lagos. On 1st April 2013, Tayo (who reads, write and speaks the French language) relocated to Cotonou, Benin Republic to begin slowly traveling across the West African region. His key purpose is to deliver talks, seminars and workshops on his key areas of focus and interest to interested audiences (Email tayo at tksola dot com for details). In a previous life, before leaving to become self-employed, Tayo served for seven years (October 1994 to December 2001) as a high performing manager in Guinness Nigeria. He rose from Shift Brewer to Training & Technical Development Manager, and later acted in senior roles as Production Manager and Technical Manager. In addition to constantly challenging the status quo and influencing positive work changes, he built a reputation for using self-taught spreadsheet programming skills (starting with Lotus 1-2-3, and later moving to Excel Visual Basic) – in his spare time – to develop Automated Spreadsheet Applications to computerize manual report generation processes in the departments he worked. Over four(4) of his applications were adopted for brewery level reporting. Tayo holds a B.Sc degree in Agricultural Extension Services from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, having graduated top of his class – with Second Class Upper Division honors – in 1992. He is an Associate Member of the UK Institute & Guild of Brewing, a 1997 National Finalist of the Nigerian Institute of Management’s(NIM) Young Managers’ competition, a Certified Psychometric Test Administrator for Psytech UK, innovator of Spontaneous Coaching for Self-Development™ (SCfS-D™), and Founder of the Self-Development Academy (SDAc). When he’s not amazing clients with his superhuman skills (wink), Tayo works as the creative force behind his Daily Self-Development Nuggets blog – on which he also publishes The Farm CEO Weekly Newspaper (sent via email to paid subscribers) and his Weekly Performance Improvement IDEAS newsletter. You can connect with him on Twitter @tksola.com and Facebook. Visit Tayo Solagbade Dot Com, to download over over 10 performance improvement resources to boost your personal and work related productivity. ====
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You’re reading PII 025: What Every Business User of Spreadsheets Needs to Boost Productivity by Tayo Solagbade, originally posted on his Daily Self-Development (SD) Nuggets™ blog. If you loved reading this post, be sure to follow Tayo on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
You may also wish to check out his growing library of tutorial and demonstration videos on Youtube. Click here, to download over 10 resources to boost your personal and work related productivity.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
On 4th May 2014, Tayo’s 9 year old domain (Spontaneousdevelopment dot com), was taken over by Aplus.net. Within a few days however, Tayo used his advanced self-taught web development skills to build (and move his website contents into) a SUPERIOR “reincarnation” at http://www.tayosolagbade.com.
Most URLs bearing the old domain name appearing in search engines should now work if “spontaneousdevelopment.com” is replaced with “tayosolagbade.com”. If you experience any difficulties finding a page or document, email Tayo at tksola dot com.
Click “Tayo, What Happened to SpontaneousDevelopmentDotCom?” to read a detailed narrative about how the above event occurred :-))
Here’s an article Tayo wrote, to inspire others to defy adversity, and bounce back to even greater reckoning at what they do EVERY time:
Succeed by Emerging from Adversity Like a Phoenix (TayoSolagbade.com launches extra Hosting plan with FREE Web Marketing!)
And he wrote the one below, to explain why losing a domain name, no matter how old NO LONGER determines your online success or otherwise:
A Proven Strategy to Find Profitable Buyers Regardless of Your Domain Name
Source: ExcelVB
