This is the place
To come to if you’re solutions focused and are willing to do the groundwork to address the needs of corporate stakeholders.
- The former requires designing the end user good controls, navigation and experience.
- The latter requires researching stakeholder needs, creating a brief, planning and progressing the build with consideration, feedback and exacting attention to detail before documenting, testing, rollout and support.
It is a series of projects guiding you in developing solutions. One project is a bookkeeping system, another is a document control register. Not at all what Excel was designed for! We’ll be using a very technical tool to create app-like environments with the cuteness of widgets to serve particular business functions, and doing so without the need for a single line of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, the programming language that underpins Microsoft Office and even – under the hood – Windows itself). It’s about thoughtful design, creative use of straightforward formulas and a dash of ‘smoke and mirrors’.
I’m also going to start halfway in and back-fill later on the first project, which is the creation of a minimalist bookkeeping system. Well, minimalist from the point of view of an end user, as there should be very little to do other than input some details to setup, past up to a years’ worth of data from multiple bank downloads and add entries to a table to match entries to the Chart of Accounts so that a Profit & Loss can be populated in a dynamic tables and charts to tell the story of your business. Oh, alright, we’ll add in an asset register and basic depreciation schedule, and oh yes, a conversion tool for adjusting foreign purchases to AUD at the time of purchase (but since the buyer won’t likely record the AU equivalent at the time of purchase or even know whether a daily, monthly or annual rate of exchange will be applied we’ll do all that behind the scenes). Oh, let’s sprinkle liberal doses of user guides, notes and tips so that they have guidance for those ‘blond moments’.
Now you think that’s fun? Well, now I’ve got to figure a way to get you there assuming zero experience with Excel! Yes haha, this won’t be written written for geeks and Excel high-flyers – they’ll just skim through – it’s written for anyone to achieve and with the lowest common denominator being nowt, that’s exactly what I’m going to assume (now you see why I’m going to be back-filling a lot).!
If you’re keen to see a particular Excel business solution, contact me and maybe we can work together on that.
What this is not
This is not the place to come if you’re a stereotype geek; happy when people are at a distance, preferably far away! Nor is this the place to learn exclusively about Excel, you’ll likely be bored with the detours and messy considerations; much easier to jump over to MrExcel or the like for a direct fix.
So off we go! (what was it that they cried at the charge of the Light Brigade?)
Projects
- Bookkeeping System
- Document Control Register
- Dashboards
Create - Manage - Produce 