It’s Sad How Fast Macros Are

This is going to be a quick post but I have to note something.

Today, I read an email where the reports done on Monday will now be due by 10:30 am.  This is very aggressive deadline considering that the summary report for the executives would be sent out between 3 and 6 pm, as a rough general rule. The last few weeks we've been running the preliminary summary report by 11 am for our Monday meeting and there would usually be a few reports not done or done with errors. Next Tuesday, if the reports were not done by 10:30 am, then the reports would not go on the summary report at all for the week.

Tough! But you go girl!

It is necessary to set tough standards because the reports are called Monday Morning Reports and not Monday Evening Reports. We have our meeting at 11 am and we are trying to have the summary ready for review at the meeting. One of the things we want to do is head off any errors in the reports. We've had instances where owners are catching errors. Not good!

(Do I sound like Trump?)

But it's going to be tough. One of the things that I was thinking about this morning when I read that email was the number of reports saved with incorrect file names. We usually have to go in and rename the files or my macro won't pick them up. The site managers can't even save the files correctly! So some of our time spent is in cleaning up the file names. And this morning an idea came into my head and I wonder why I didn't think of it before.

Today, I spent some time developing a macro to find incorrectly named files and fix them. And that macro does it in a heartbeat. It is soooo much faster than me. And that's sad.

I don't understand why people don't push excel to do their repetitive work. I can understand why they don't do macros because developing programs does take time - sometimes a lot of time. But one can develop formulas and logic to perform everyday work and people still don't attempt to do that.

And now macros. They are so much faster and more accurate (once you've set up everything correctly) that there is no use competing against them. And the future is going to move that way. I think if we start practicing the programming part and figuring out what pieces of our work are susceptible to code and which we can still retain, we might be better prepared.

It is just sad how fast macros are.