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Using Spreadsheets to Make Boring Tasks Less Repetitive

by Rico on October 10th, 2007

I already talked about effectively accomplishing repetitive tasks. And I talked about finding ways to make a task less repetitive next time. Here’s a little something I learned along the way. All you need is your favorite spreadsheet program, and minimal programming skills.

Note: I’ll be using Excel. But you can easily adapt my approach to OpenOffice.Org or other free substitutes.

Let’s say that, on a regular basis, you have to create lists of similarly formatted content. Like a list of links:

• <a href=”http://fool45.com”>Rico’s Personal Blog</a>
• <a href=”http://thesmartpda.com”>Rico’s Gadget Blog</a>
• <a href=”http://contract-worker.com”>Rico’s Freelance Blog</a>
• <a href=”http://bayanihanblogs.com”>The First Filipino Blog Network</a>

Yes, it’s easy when there are only four items. But imagine if the list required a hundred items. 1,000. 10,000. You get the picture.

The first step is to determine what’s common among everything. In this case, it’s these:

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No matter how long the list is, these bunches of text will always be there. Now that you know what repeats, how can you automate it? How do your lessen your load by making the computer take care of repeating it for you? In a spreadsheet, you can use formulas to combine text from different cells. In Excel, you can do this through “&”. Like so:

So it’s reasonable to expect that you can combine the repeated text with what you input:

Do you see what I’m getting at? If you set up a spreadsheet properly, all you have to do is enter what changes, never inputting what you already have many times before. Hope this quick lesson makes repetitive tasks a lot easier for you!

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POSTED IN: Useful Tools, Ways to Work Faster