I was going over spreadsheets with a client yesterday, a really cool and complex set of formulas and spreadsheets for overseeing 2 managers, 35 employees, 58 customers in 5 districts.
There is a series of spreadsheets with contract details regarding service levels, pricing, hours of work, and contact info for each customer. The COO had developed a master dashboard that linked all the customer spreadsheets into a companywide overview so she can quickly locate details for any customer, manager, or employee that she needs information on. Sometimes she needed more detail than what was on the dashboard and would have to find and open the file on the network drive. It only takes 2 minutes to find the right file, but she was doing it 5-10 times per day.
Until I showed her that holding the CTRL key while pressing the [ (left bracket) would take you directly to the cell being referenced in the formula, even if Excel needs to open another spreadsheet.
CTRL [ is a trivial pursuit question if I have ever heard of one, but it will save an average of 15 minutes per day for her. Do the math on 15 minutes per day, for 5 days a week, and 50 weeks per year (yes, there are people who go on vacations!) and that translates to 62.5 hours of savings. Now you can take 3.5 weeks of vacation this year. Rather have the cash over vacation? Multiply 60.5 hours times your loaded hourly rate to see how much money that adds up to.
I don’t care if you call it lifetime learning, continuous learning, or whatever current catch phase is circulating in your world right now, just STAY CURIOUS!
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