Save Time When Saving Excel Files

Save Time With Excel Macros

Last week, Seth Godin recommended hiring a geek to help you save an hour a day.

Well, you’re a geek, so you don’t have to hire one! Just pay attention as you run through your morning office routine, and answer this question:

  • What can you change about your Excel habits, to save an hour a day, or even a few minutes?

Then, make the change.

Doing Steps Manually

Every morning, I follow these steps:

  • download some website statistics to Excel,
  • crunch the numbers, and
  • save the raw data file.

Fortunately, I have a macro that does the first 2 steps. For some reason, I was doing the last step manually. Don’t ask me why.

Excel is a bit slow when opening the Save As dialog box, so that final step was taking 30-60 seconds. Not a huge productivity drain, but why do something manually, if it can be easily automated?

Make It Automated

To get rid of that manual step, I added a few lines of code to the existing macro. The Excel VBA code saves a copy of the active workbook, into the Backup folder, and adds the previous day’s date to the file name.

It only took me a couple of minutes to add the code, so the time invested was quickly repaid. Now I just have another 59 minutes to trim!

Macro Code to Save Daily File

'------
Sub SaveDailyData()
Dim wbData As Workbook
Dim strDir As String
Dim strName As String
Dim strExt As String
Set wbData = ActiveWorkbook
strDir = "C:\Backups"
strName = "DailyData_" & Format(Date - 1, "yyyymmdd")
strExt = ".xls"
wbData.SaveCopyAs strDir & strName & strExt
wbData.Close SaveChanges:=False
End Sub
Save Time With Excel Macros
Save Time With Excel Macros

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