For a variety of reasons, I needed to talk to a colleague of mine at work today. He’d needed a document from me yesterday, and I wanted to check and see if that was something that he was going to need on a monthly basis going forward.<\/p>\n
Never hurts to check, right?<\/p>\n
Well, in the course of the conversation, we got to talking about a series of weekly documents he produces. “It’s the only thing I do on Mondays,” he said. “It takes all day, and it has to be done on Mondays.”<\/p>\n
I’d never thought to ask before. “Tell me, what is it you do?”<\/p>\n
He opened up a Word document. “See this?” he said. “I have to go through and I have to delete out this, and delete out that, and it’s tedious. Drudge work.”<\/p>\n
I thought for a moment. “Can you send me that? And maybe any written instructions you have? I think I can write a Word macro to take care of all that.”<\/p>\n
“Really?”<\/p>\n
I shrugged. “Let me see what I can do.”<\/p>\n
He sent me the files.<\/p>\n
I opened up the Word document. I printed off the instructions.<\/p>\n
I’ve written a ton<\/i> of macros for my own personal use at work. Some of the code I’d written there, I realized, would need only minor tweaking to perform the necessary surgery on this Word document — removing codes, deleting certain lines, fixing some broken names.<\/p>\n
I started coding. And in about an hour I had something that worked<\/i>.<\/p>\n
It’s a two-step process. The first takes the document and “cleanses” it of unnecessary data. Since that file gets used later, a second macro takes the “cleansed” document and creates a separate document that has had even more<\/i> data deleted from it. A “family friendly” document, shall we say.<\/p>\n
I asked my colleague to come by my cubicle when he had the chance.<\/p>\n
I ran the procedure.<\/p>\n
He blinked.<\/p>\n
“Oh my god,” he said.<\/p>\n
It took less than a minute.<\/p>\n
Doing the same procedure by hand, it took an hour and a half.<\/p>\n
It’s certainly going to take off some of the Monday stress on my colleague.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I’m just too good. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For a variety of reasons, I needed to talk to a colleague of mine at work today. He’d needed a document from me yesterday, and I wanted to check and see if that was something that he was going to need on a monthly basis going forward. Never hurts to check, right? Well, in theContinue reading “On Writing Macros At Work”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[426,4124],"class_list":["post-1938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-microsoft-word","tag-work","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}