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
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There is a WordPress plugin by the name of CodeColorer that actually works to make VBA code look like, well VBA code.
Thanks Gregory, I’m testing the CodeColorer on my Debra D’s Blog, to make sure that I understand how it works.