Into the Storm

Okay, it has started.

The week before this week, we had training. On Monday of this week, we had our trial run. After the Monday meeting, my boss asked if it would be easier to do the report manually. She was already giving up? I told her that they just needed to try it out two or three times to get a feel for how the process would work (which is basically run the OneSite reports, download them, and copy and paste). If they can’t copy and paste, how can we expect them to do the math when doing the report manually?

It looks like a lot of them either didn’t attend the training or wasn’t really present mentally. Some didn’t bother running the report with the correct parameters, so they didn’t look at the manual. Some persisted on missing the yellow highlighted cell when pasting despite I showing that process six times, so that sounds like being mentally absent during the training.

Somebody actually went in and unprotected the spreadsheet and overwrote the formulas. They doesn’t sound incompetent.

So the remainder of the week was spent trying to develop macros to get around the issues that arose during the trial run. One problem I faced was that if you use a macro to copy and paste things, the file will get larger, sometimes doubling! But once the macro has done some copying and pasting, the next time you run that macro, the file size does not increase again…I think.

Another thing that will increase the file size is all of the protection formatting. File size seems to double. Also, if you have protection, your pictures can’t be moved around. I have some pictures created, using the camera tool, and now they can’t be moved around or resized, due to the protection in place.

Last night, I think I got a macro that will do the job and not increase the size of the file. I’m going to have to try it with the larger properties to see how well the macro takes the OneSite downloads and then see what kind of size the file end up.

I would rather they retain control via their copying and pasting rather than letting a macro do it because a macro can’t adjust to all sorts of weird things the OneSite system produces in Excel downloads. A human is much better at adjusting to the vagaries of unusual downloads, once they are trained and used to the copying and pasting process. But with folks freaking out and not remaining calm, I’m writing up a macro to try to handle most of the download issues. We’ll see how that goes.