Cruel, But Necessary

Thursday, August 25, 2011

From time to time I get emails from people who would like to take some work off my hands.

I don’t have enough work to be taken off my hands.

And if I did, I’d just put in longer hours, because I love the work I do.

(I’m one of the lucky ones who gets paid to indulge myself in one of my passions).

The work I get is sometimes critical, sometimes not, but it’s always geared to my skills and attributes, so client’s can be shuffled and juggled, providing that I’m open with them.

The problem remains: how to let down would-be gurus without closing the door.

One solution is to see if they would be able to do what I do.

Hi!

Here are outlines of some recent jobs I've done in Excel.

Perhaps you'd let me know how you'd go about solving them.

Just pick 3 or 4, don't do all, and write up a few lines on each, so I can gauge your skill level.

1: We have an Excel workbook with 2,300 companies extracted from our database and we would like to issue a one-page fax to each company. Have you a way of dealing with this?

2: Could you do a search for all companies on the TSX and TSXV with the name "gold" as part of the corporate name, and narrow it to those with a market capital of $20MM to $80 MM? Please call me for further details.

3: I need a bit of help, about two hours training. We are a luxury travel company, with six worksheets used as templates to build quotations. I would like to make the workbooks “Work Better”.

4: What did you do back in the day when you had to work with 200,000+ records and  Excel could only handle 65,000 rows. Is splitting the total into 3 sheets the best solution?

5: Excel issue...  Two columns...

Name; URL

name1; url1

name2; url2

How do I make the name column hyperlinked by using the URL column?

6: We need the amount of capital raised for resource companies (with $5MM market cap or less) in Canada over the last 2 years (since June 2008) so it can be compared to our company. The data should be amenable to be put into a bar chart, e.g. GLD raised 16 million; The average resource co with less than $ 5 million market cap raised XXX$, the top 10% decile raised YYY$.

7: There is a spreadsheet that several people use to input data.  The president wants to receive an email when the value in a cell is equal to a certain criteria.

8: I'd like the database to send automatic email remainders to clients that confirm their course reservations - 10 business days prior to the 1st booking date of each registration.

9: I have a client that is looking for someone to teach one-to-one VBA for Excel macros for a finance person. The trainer must have a very professional demeanor as this is for a large formal corporate client.

10: We have a set of seven workbooks which calculate ROI on our products, but the worksheets are getting out of hand. Can you come up with a coherent design so that we can maintain and expand our offerings to our sales force?

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