Manual Fallback: The Invisible Worker Rule

There are many ways to write macros. From experience, on a business environment, there are some general rules that will make them easier to write and use at the long term.

There is however one rule to “rule them all":

• MANUAL FALLBACK “the invisible worker”: the best macros are “invisible”. They produce Excel sheets exactly like the ones being created manually. They do not have macros themselves or macro functions, they contain numbers, text and links. Once done, it is impossible to distinguish between the macro output or a manual created one;

This is very important as it guarantees a fallback – if for any reason the macro fails (and they do fail) and it is not possible to overcome the issue (because the person who did the macro is not available, or it will take too much time), it can still be done by hand.

As an example: on one company, every month, hundreds of similar Excel files must be linked into a “consolidated” view. All input files where pretty similar but with slight differences, so linking could not solve the problem because the exact cells to link would change every month. They had to be found by criteria, not hard links to specific cells. This was done manually by one person for a whole week, and would usually have errors and hundreds of links would be created from the consolidated file to each input file.

Instead of creating a macro on the consolidated file “pulling” the values, the macro was created on a separated file. It would scan all input files and create the links on the consolidated file. Once done, it was similar to the file that was manually created before. But it would only took 2 hours to run and had no errors.

So, the macro was an “invisible worker”, doing in 2 hours the exact same work as before in 5 days, freeing one person to do values added tasks instead on Excel links. But the end result can still be checked, validated or performed manually, in case the macro fails.

Work smarter, outsource your boring work to your “invisible worker”!

The VBA Bits – getting rid of “plumbing”

Copying web development ideas.

In the past, web developers used to have a very rough deal - they had to spend most of the time coding tedious tasks like locating the page element to change or just plain working around browser differences. Then, one day, libraries like JQuery arrived taking care of all this “plumbing” and allowing them to just write what they needed to do:

(from http://purencool.com/javascript-and-jquery-what-is-the-difference )

This approach was so successful than nowadays there are thousands of libraries to write web & mobile applications – some generic, some specialized like charting libraries. But the lesson remains: “Code your needs, not plumbing”

This blog attempts to replicate this success with the VBA Bits. Small prices of independent VBA functions that can be copied to any macro to simplify specific tasks. Just copy them to a code module on your own macro and use them to simplify tasks. 

Forget the macro recorder - It’s not that easy

So why are not everyone writing macros?

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know from experience: because writing macros is not easy.

Most tasks are repetitive BUT with slight differences that demand it to change/adapt according to case. So they need some sort of intelligence, which is not easy to program for anyone but software developers. Which is not the case for Excel business users.

What about the built-in macro recorder? Most people first encounter with macros involve the macro recorder and it creates the illusion that you don’t need to write a macro. Just perform the task you want to automate and record it. Then run it again and again.

Well, if your repetitive task is EXACTLY THE SAME every time, it may work. But almost always, there will be some differences:

• Different number of rows or columns
• Conditional tasks – merge A and B to get a product code only if B is numeric
• Changes in data for every iteration
• …

The macro recorder will record EXACTLY what you did when recording. So, if you delete the “-“ on the product code in cell C10 because it is a number, it will do it again to cell C10 next month – even if it is not a number and the number is on row 12 because the product list is different every month.

There is actually a very good use for the macro recorder – and it will be explained in a later post. But it is not writing macros.

Excel Macros: automating the boring stuff

Work Smarter – outsource the boring tasks to Excel

Excel macros are “Excel Apps”. Some smaller, some larger, but all of them are “Apps” that extend Excel native capabilities. And, like any other App for a Smartphone, Tablet or PC, they are software.

And what can they do for you? Well, automate the million time-consuming tasks that anyone using Excel do. Most specially, the really annoying, no value added, long and repetitive tasks, like manipulating data on 6000 rows every month. So, how far can it go? Well, I’ve seen cases like this: 3 days to 11 seconds. 

Most cases are not this extreme, but even if the macro takes some time to run, like 2 hours and locking Excel while running (no Microsoft Office application will run acceptably on the PC while the macro is running), it is running by itself. So you are free to do something else (maybe on another PC). Or leave it running unattended during lunch time or overnight and deal with the results when you’re back.

That’s it – you can start outsourcing some of your boring work to Excel and leave it alone to come up with the results.