this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Hold up...
Spreadsheet world championship?
You wanna get rich? Learn to fix other people’s spreadsheets.
Seriously.
Setting up a couple of spreadsheets at my job has basically been the entire grounds for me receiving bonuses last year, and it looks to be the same this year too. I don't even know that much, I just Google "excel xlookup" or whatever half the time, but people think it's black magic.
My main one last year turned a 30 minute daily task into something it do once a week in about 10 minutes on a busy week, and just print off the daily sheet each night to post. This year, I just added drop-down menus and some conditional checks to someone else's sheet.
I'm just amazed nobody else did this before, because I was sick of doing the old way everyday after my first week.
Some people just dont get the concept of modern technology, if its annoying / tedious, someone has already devised an easier way. If they havent, then you do it and sell the solution to others.
It may have not been done before because some people don't trust even the most basic of automation. I once cut a 2+ hour task to 5 minutes using count and vlookup (I'm not even good at excel it was just stupid easy to do). I was reprimanded and told to do it manually because they "don't trust excel will do it correctly". But you do trust I will manually count hundreds of lines correctly without making a mistake? Me using a calculator (handheld calculator) to count cells in excel is the most accurate way to do this? This was a global company BTW, not some podunk mom and pop. Make it make sense...
Here’s a trick. Don’t tell anyone when you automate something, especially if you are working for a huge corporation. Check that your automation works by doing it by hand a few times, and then begin to take just as much time to do it, but automate it.
In the meantime, level up other skills, take longer walks around the office, whatever you can get away with to enhance your wellbeing. And if they ask for more from you, take 10% less time. Tell them you’ve been focusing on learning keyboard shortcuts, better document organization, whatever.
A big corp will not compensate you for your efficiency. At best they will expect it to now be automated from you and give you more work to make up for the time difference with a minimal impact in compensation. At worst, they will ask how you automated it, work it into a new hire’s routine, and then let you go as you are now obsolete.
This is the way. Time yourself by hand. Automate. Use the saved time to automate further. Meet deadlines as if you were doing it by hand. Then during the inevitable crunch time you can miraculously come through. Each quarter, cut about 10% off the time you "need" to do automated tasks, showing constant improvement.
Lastly, always guard source code closely and be aware if coding on company time means they own that code. You can bring up that you think something can be automated, but this is a job they're gonna have to pay you extra for. Show a demo if you need to, but remember that coding automations isn't your job, so don't hand that over for free (payment in social capital depends on your job).
Found out accounting was manually going through a monster list of line items and deleting zeroed rows.
Manger's meeting: "Uh, guys, I can write a PowerShell script to do that in seconds. Can someone tell me exactly what you're looking for and deleting?"
CFO blew me off, didn't understand what I was offering. Went to her second-in-command and explained. 24-hours later...
"Holy shit! You saved my girls 2-hours of work a day!!!"
The department got me a nice present. :) But better yet, the goodwill I earned was great for everyone. Something to be said for helping one another.
The trouble with this I've found is that nobody bothers to learn how you did it (even if the Excel is fairly trivial) and now you're responsible for everyone's Excel sheets. And they constantly find ways to break it no matter how many rules you implement.
If you give me scripting I will eliminate as much repetition as I can.
Good shit identifying something that could be automated! Seems like it's already paying off, and it's such an under utilized skill I'm sure you'll continue to be awarded for it. It's almost entirely why software engineers get paid so damn much.
Almost everything we do is with the goal of automating something, with the whole product often being some helpful automations for people's lives. The company I work for pulled a billion dollars in revenue and we just automate healthcare data ingress and egress.
Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be worth your time to learn some basic Python. Dead simple language but incredibly powerful.
=INDEX(return_range,MATCH(search_term, lookup_range,0)) enjoyers: XLOOKUP? You were this close to greatness 😢
I recommend the video from people make games on this topic