EXCEL: THE BEST TOOL FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZED BUSINESSES! Excel is used all over the world for a wide range of applications, from simple calculations, to complicated industrial spreadsheets. Of course, its most common use is in accounting or financial departments, but how many of us really know that Excel can help almost all departments in a modern company? CASE 1: Automated website updating? One of our customers had the following problem: he had one of his employees assigned to update the company s website everyday with new values. The website offers information services to visitors and potential customers. So, each day, the employee had to gather information from other sites, process this information and update the website using an updating system their outsource web creator had done. This system used SQL Server database to update the site, but the creator did not supply an option for batch updating. This procedure required the allocation of almost half of everyday s time for this employee. We suggested a simple solution: 1. Excel connects to external websites that contain the necessary information 2. It processes the data and formats using specified guidelines 3. It batch updates the database 4. Excel automatically closes. All that is needed by the employee is to open the application and wait around 3 minutes until it finishes processing and sending the data. Then, he performs a simple check on the website to ensure that everything is updated correctly. We installed this solution almost one year ago and since then it failed two times. In both cases, there were network problems and the application could not connect to external web sites. You do not need Excel to calculate that this company reduced the required time for this procedure by more than 90%! And they assigned much more creative and efficient tasks to this employee, so everyone was happy! Some weeks ago, we received a call from our customer, explaining that they have fully automated the procedure: with the help of an electrician, they created a method to start the pc automatically. Once started, the pc is set to login, start our application and shut down with no human interference at all. Nice stuff! CASE 2: Label printing for mass mailings. Many companies in our days use plenty of techniques to communicate with their customers. Many of them use the mail to send letters, marketing material or product catalogs. One company that sends almost 100.000 catalogs each month approached us asking for a simplified label-printing solution. At the time, they used a combination of Excel and Word and plenty of manual work to first remove duplicate addresses and then print the labels. We suggested a solution implemented in Excel 2007 version which only requires pasting the addresses in a specific worksheet of Excel. We used our enhanced duplicate removing algorithm to "clean" the data and then created an advanced VBA macro that prints the addresses using the customer s specified label dimensions. The user also has the ability to choose whether they want the printing done in one batch or in small packages in case they want better control of the printing procedure. There is no end on this list of tasks inside a company that Excel can improve: Almost all departments of an organization can take advantage of this powerful tool. Some simple examples: Logistics and Inventory can print and manage barcodes or control stock using advanced Excel macros. Marketing can manage customer lists and apply simple CRM tasks. Information Department can produce or import ASCII files easily or improve EDI transactions. Personnel can program shifts or use Excel as a Payroll application. Management can have dynamic reporting or decision analysis tools WHY CUSTOM EXCEL APPLICATIONS? WHY SHOULD I PREFER YOUR APPLICATIONS? Because you can have innovative applications with really affordable prices. Excel is usually pre-installed in almost any PC, and in case you will need to buy it, it costs less than $200. By choosing to use a custom application, you pay only for things you really need. On the other hand, with stand-alone applications you pay for a bunch of extra options that do not fit your needs and you are not interested in. Just like cost, the time needed to create a custom application in Excel is much less than any stand-alone one. In custom Excel applications, you do not need to design and implement an interface, this is supplied by Excel itself and users are familiar with it. Our applications are free of licensing costs and restrictions. You can use our applications in any workstation with no extra cost. And we use a balanced philosophy: Simplicity and user-friendliness weights for us as much as the powerful VBA code we use to make the application work just like you require! Please visit our site to learn more or download some of our demos.
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