When I first started working with spreadsheets back in 1988 on SuperCalc, I only has basic knowledge of computers then. In 1989, that knowledge was then transferred to Lotus 123 V2.3, which I had a summer employment while still in high school that involved using the spreadsheet program. Namely, the reason why I got the employment is simple. My level of skills to pick up programming terminology was very quick, which I also worked with BASIC in 1984, which my teacher had me type in the program into BASIC character for character and run the program for spelling lessons back in 7th grade.
In my college years, I also had employment, which do you know how many things people did by hand, which I thought was rather tedious and time consuming to do by hand, thus I turned to the computer to do the work for me? Started out with me working in Lotus 123, v3.1 for payroll stuff. I then went to work at the university and did athletic stuff in Excel 5.0. However, as the funds got tight cause I was only working part time while going to school full time, I ended up having to find other employment, which was a very rough part of my life. Eventually cause of my Accounting education, I started working through Accountemps, which I helped very places get more things done on the computer. I then landed a permanent job, which I still work for the company despite the division has been sold 2 different types since my employment with the company 6 years ago.
I started out doing a lot of things in Excel 97, which when I was working in Excel 97, I hated it. Even to this day, I still think Lotus 123 v 2.3 is better than Excel 97 cause Excel 97 is so unstable and unreliable. Anyhow, after I got a lot of smaller tasks done so fast, my boss handed me a job that he thought was going to take me 3 days to get done, but I got it done in 3 hours just by using my comptuer skills with Excel 97.
Well after that, I was then moved from Accounting and out to Production. At that point of time, they had 2 people doing their production reports, one person gathered the information and typed it in, and another person, who initially had set it up, worked the information through the system. Tell you the truth, what they had was a basic framework of the production reporting system, but lacked so much of the automations. It was like building a house without running water, so you would have to go out to the well and fetch your water by hand.
I told my boss, give me 2 weeks to get it more automated, as I'm for one not withstanding to do things inefficiently. I got the automations fully in place within 2 weeks time, for what we had at that time. We still had to do paper logs and input the data by hand, but at least, we didn't have to do any of the calculations or copying and pasting by hand anymore.
However, the system took 35 to 40 minutes just for all of the calculations to take place within Excel 97. This was a vast improvement cause it now meant that it only took 1 person up to a total of 5 hours to do the work, but I still wasn't pleased with the results cause for what I had in place, I knew it shouldn't had taken that long to calculate, even on a P2, 266MHz system. That led me to think of Excel doing redundant calculations, which then at that time, I knew about macros, but never had worked with macros up to that point of time. I also knew, in order to speed it up by knocking out the redundant calculations, I would have to take off the automatic calculations, but I also didn't want to do it by hand either, thus macros was the only thing that would fit the job.
Well I started messing around with the macro stuff and once I got to learn the VBA environment, I had created a relatively simple macro that opened and closed each workbook in their respective order, and ran the calculations via code using the Worksheet.Calculate Method. Once, I setup the code, and ran it, it only took the program 3 to 5 minutes to run all of the calculations and charts.
Well while I got the later part done, the IT department
Slashdot Mirror
When I first started working with spreadsheets back in 1988 on SuperCalc, I only has basic knowledge of computers then. In 1989, that knowledge was then transferred to Lotus 123 V2.3, which I had a summer employment while still in high school that involved using the spreadsheet program. Namely, the reason why I got the employment is simple. My level of skills to pick up programming terminology was very quick, which I also worked with BASIC in 1984, which my teacher had me type in the program into BASIC character for character and run the program for spelling lessons back in 7th grade.
In my college years, I also had employment, which do you know how many things people did by hand, which I thought was rather tedious and time consuming to do by hand, thus I turned to the computer to do the work for me? Started out with me working in Lotus 123, v3.1 for payroll stuff. I then went to work at the university and did athletic stuff in Excel 5.0. However, as the funds got tight cause I was only working part time while going to school full time, I ended up having to find other employment, which was a very rough part of my life. Eventually cause of my Accounting education, I started working through Accountemps, which I helped very places get more things done on the computer. I then landed a permanent job, which I still work for the company despite the division has been sold 2 different types since my employment with the company 6 years ago.
I started out doing a lot of things in Excel 97, which when I was working in Excel 97, I hated it. Even to this day, I still think Lotus 123 v 2.3 is better than Excel 97 cause Excel 97 is so unstable and unreliable. Anyhow, after I got a lot of smaller tasks done so fast, my boss handed me a job that he thought was going to take me 3 days to get done, but I got it done in 3 hours just by using my comptuer skills with Excel 97.
Well after that, I was then moved from Accounting and out to Production. At that point of time, they had 2 people doing their production reports, one person gathered the information and typed it in, and another person, who initially had set it up, worked the information through the system. Tell you the truth, what they had was a basic framework of the production reporting system, but lacked so much of the automations. It was like building a house without running water, so you would have to go out to the well and fetch your water by hand.
I told my boss, give me 2 weeks to get it more automated, as I'm for one not withstanding to do things inefficiently. I got the automations fully in place within 2 weeks time, for what we had at that time. We still had to do paper logs and input the data by hand, but at least, we didn't have to do any of the calculations or copying and pasting by hand anymore.
However, the system took 35 to 40 minutes just for all of the calculations to take place within Excel 97. This was a vast improvement cause it now meant that it only took 1 person up to a total of 5 hours to do the work, but I still wasn't pleased with the results cause for what I had in place, I knew it shouldn't had taken that long to calculate, even on a P2, 266MHz system. That led me to think of Excel doing redundant calculations, which then at that time, I knew about macros, but never had worked with macros up to that point of time. I also knew, in order to speed it up by knocking out the redundant calculations, I would have to take off the automatic calculations, but I also didn't want to do it by hand either, thus macros was the only thing that would fit the job.
Well I started messing around with the macro stuff and once I got to learn the VBA environment, I had created a relatively simple macro that opened and closed each workbook in their respective order, and ran the calculations via code using the Worksheet.Calculate Method. Once, I setup the code, and ran it, it only took the program 3 to 5 minutes to run all of the calculations and charts.
Well while I got the later part done, the IT department