•2 min read•from Microsoft Excel | Help & Support with your Formula, Macro, and VBA problems | A Reddit Community
Creating an Auto Scheduler for my Work’s Department
Our take
Creating an auto scheduler for your department is an ambitious yet rewarding project that can significantly streamline task assignments. With around 40 team members and a current manual scheduling process that consumes 2-3 hours weekly, automating this workflow offers a valuable opportunity for efficiency. Start by exploring how Excel can leverage task time estimates, shift assignments, and PTO considerations to intelligently auto-populate schedules.
I realize I may go down a rabbit hole and this could potentially take me months or maybe even longer, but that’s fine I just need starting points for my research.
My experience:
Not a lot. Limited to extremely basic functions (e.g. SUM, IF, AND, OR), conditional formatting, data validation. Willing to delve into VBN but I know that requires basic knowledge of programming.
Goal:
There’s ~40 people in my department and we have an excel sheet that tracks all the daily tasks that need to be completed. There’s myself and a manager that makes the schedule for our respective sides of the week and it takes us 2-3 hours each week to assign each task one by one until the schedule is filled out. I would like to automate this in some kind of way.
Ideas:
- Assign a theoretical/average time to complete a task.
- Set each task as either an AM or PM shift specific task, and other tasks that can be completed by either shift.
- Assign people to a specific shift, and how many hours their shift is and on what days.
- If people have planned PTO, being able to update the available analysts that Excel will take into account.
- Excel does the work of auto-populating tasks with a person for each task accounting everything above and not assigning tasks that would cumulatively exceed the number of hours they’re at work, as well as averaging the workload between each person.
- Dynamic and editable after cells are auto-populated. Truthfully this is not required, but a quality of life. People call out, emergency situations might come up that might require attention over daily tasks, etc. My thought is I can copy the results and paste it into a separate sheet that can be editable as the week goes on.
Again I’m sure I have no idea how much work I’m asking for and it may be way above my capabilities, but as you roast me in the comments at least leave something that I can use to help me get started. Appreciate yall.
[link] [comments]
Read on the original site
Open the publisher's page for the full experience
Related Articles
- Creating an auto-populating visual calendar for multiple departments to view?I coordinate student schedules across multiple hospital units. I log the shifts in an hours log spreadsheet (date, start time, end time, unit, student name, etc.). Every month, I need to send each unit a schedule showing who is coming in and when so they can review and plan coverage. Right now, this part is very manual, and does not lend to tracking any data like how many students on each units, hours, etc., which we need as a department. We have over 100 students each month, so as much automizing as possible would be helpful as its a big process. Ideally, I’d like something that: Pulls directly from the hours log (no retyping or copy/paste) Is easy to read at a glance for unit managers Can handle many units, many months, and many students Lets me filter by unit + month I'm not really an excel genius, and I've been using copilot to help me with some of this and formulations, but It's not providing me with accurate formulas for the actual calendar conversion. If there are any resources on what formulas to use, what platforms that I could maybe look into for how to do this, or just honestly any advice at all. We've gotten the data tracking mostly drafted up and it's able to pull from pivot tables and show the analytics, but the calendar is my biggest hurdle at the moment. submitted by /u/JuggernautFlashy6489 [link] [comments]
- Pull static data from one sheet to use in a VLookup, then output static data + returned values? Can my process be improved?Hi all, I have a weekly process at work that I am hoping to improve, and preferably completely automate. With the help of this subreddit I have taken this process from hundreds of steps down to a few dozen, but I think more can be done – I am hoping for suggestions (and if automation seems possible, a point in the right direction as to where to start). I will do my best to describe the process without droning on, but there are a number of nuances which I feel may be important. Our largest client sends us a weekly census file for their retirees, which contains information (46 columns) that affect the type of materials I am responsible for sending, as well as the content of those materials, per household (retiree + any dependents). Each file can contain between 1 and 30 retirees. To complete my tasks, I use four separate excel files: The census file The “calculator,” which generates a contribution amount based whether the retiree (and their dependent(s), if applicable) are over or under 65, years of service and what division the employee worked in. It seems like the process is a series of IF formulas, paired with a VLOOKUP. A “premium payment tool” which essentially subtracts the contribution from the premium amounts and is formatted for output onto the master mailing list A master mailing list, which includes the retiree’s demographic info, plus their coverage options and individualized rates To say the process is convoluted is an understatement. Each household is one row on the census file – the client provides the ages and disability status of all household members. My current process: Copy/Paste the retiree’s: first and last name, DOB, SSN, address, and phone number. The order on the client’s file does not match the order that my company uses. I typically will copy/paste one column at a time for all rows in the census file, then complete the following steps one row at a time Determine the ages of the retiree, their spouse, and their children (if applicable). If all household members are in the same age group (Pre or Post-65) based on the date of retirement, only one entry on the Mailing file is required. If one household member is in a different age group than the other(s), two entries on the Mailing file are required. Additionally, if a household member has an “E” in the disability column of the file, they are treated as being Post-65 regardless of age. 3. Using the Calculator, determine the employee's monthly contribution amount based on service years, group, and section type. The process is repeated if the employee has a spouse, and again if they have a child dependent (so from 1-3 times per employee). 4. Copy the monthly contribution amount for each household member into the Premium Payment tool – there are two sheets, one for Pre-65 and one for Post-65. Each sheet has cells for the Retiree, Spouse, and Child. The contribution amount is subtracted from the premium rates and formatted for output to the Mailing file. If there is no contribution amount under one household member, the output returns a “N/A” under that coverage. Ex: https://preview.redd.it/csqgmr9038sg1.jpg?width=975&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa781f5373077cf354886b63ae99349d178281ed 5. Copy the “You Pay” amount onto the Mailing file Besides the time it takes to complete this process for larger files, the sheer amount of copy/pasting required leaves a lot of room for error. What I am working with now is infinitely better than what the girl before me was doing. I was able to add enough formulas to reduce the copy/pasting by about 75% but I suspect more can be done to automate things – I’m just not sure if it’s feasible solely in Excel. I’d love to hear what the community thinks, please let me know what additional info I can provide. Thank you all so much! submitted by /u/stina__saurus [link] [comments]
- Formatting question for automating data entryIm going to try to articulate what I need and if it’s possible to do inside excel. At my job I have to record the amount of patrons using our facilities. and specify what particular services are being used. at the end of each quarter. (3 month period) I must tally up all the numbers and provide a total for each aspect of our facility as well as the total overall. For example. 1st quarter numbers. 100 patrons used theatre. 250 patrons used Game room 450 patrons used computer lab so on and so forth. Now that you have the gist in your head. Imagine a spreadsheet where the first form is just a data entry sheet. it’s essentially just a box that never changes. You input the numbers for the week, and that data gets automatically moved to a different cell that has the total amount. so that at the end of the quarter I can easily see my total without having to backtrack or tediously add. if anyone has some insight on how I can do this Please reach out. If you have any questions about my wording or understanding exactly what I mean please also reach out. If you read all this I appreciate your time. submitted by /u/Beneficial-Yard-9006 [link] [comments]
- What would you do with this task, and how long would it take you to do it?I'm going to describe a situation as specifically as I can. I am curious what people would do in this situation, I worry that I complicate things for myself. I'm describing the whole task as it was described to me and then as I discovered it. Ultimately, I'm here to ask you, what do you do, and how long does it take you to do it? I started a new role this month, I am new to advertising modeling methods like mmm, so I am reading a lot about how to apply the methods specific to mmm in R and python, I use VScode, I don't have a github copilot license, I get to use copilot through windows office license. Although this task did not involve modeling, I do want to ask about that kind of task another day if this goes over well. The task 5, excel sheets are to be provided. You are told that this is a clients data that was given to another party for some other analysis and augmentation. This is a quality assurance task. The previous process was as follows; the data the data structure: 1 workbook per industry for 5 industries 4 workbooks had 1 tab, 1 workbook had 3 tabs each tab had a table that had a date column in days, 2 categorical columns advertising_partner, line_of_business and at least 2 numeric columns per work book. some times data is updated from our side and the partner has to redownload the data and reprocess and share again the process this is done once per client, per quarter (but it's just this client for now) open each workbook navigate to each tab the data is in a "controllable" table bing bing home home impressions spend partner dropdown line of business dropdown where bing and home are controlled with drop down toggles, with a combination of 3-4 categories each. compare with data that is to be downloaded from a tableau dashboard end state: the comparison of the metrics in tableau to the excel tables to ensure that "the numbers are the same" the categories presented map 1 to 1 with the data you have downloaded from tableau aggregate the data in a pivot table, select the matching categories, make sure the values match additional info about the file the summary table is a complicated sumproduct look up table against an extremely wide table hidden to the left. the summary table can start as early as AK and as late as FE. there are 2 broadly different formats of underlying data in the 5 notebooks, with small structure differences between the group of 3. in the group of 3 the structure of this wide table is similar to the summary table with categories in the column headers describing the metric below it. but with additional categories like region, which is the same value for every column header. 1 of these tables has 1 more header category than the other 2 the left most columns have 1 category each, there are 3 date columns for day, quarter. REGION USA USA USA PARTNER bing bing google LOB home home auto impressions spend ...etc date quarter impressions spend ...etc 2023-01-01 q1 1 2 ...etc 2023-01-02 q1 3 4 ...etc in the group of 2 the left most categories are actually the categorical headers in the group of 3, and the metrics, the values in each category mach the dates are now the headers of this very wide table the header labels are separated from the start of the values by 1 column there is an empty row immediately below the final row for column headers. date Label 2023-01-01 2023-01-02 year 2023 2023 quarter q1 q1 blank row REGION PARTNER LOB measure blank row US bing home impressions 1 3 US bing home spend 2 4 US google auto ...etc ...etc ... etc The question is, what do you do, and how long does it take you to do it? I am being honest here, I wrote out this explaination basically in the order in which I was introduced to the information and how I discovered it. (Oh it's easy if it's all the same format even if it's weird, oh there are 2-ish different formatted files) the meeting of this task ended at 11:00AM. I saw this copy paste manual etl project and I simply didn't want to do it. So I outlined my task by identifying the elements of the table, column name ranges, value ranges, stacked / pivoted column ranges, etc... for an R script to extract that data. by passing the ranges of that content to an argument make_clean_table(left_columns="B4:E4", header_dims=c(..etc)) and functions that extract that convert that excel range into the correct position in the table to extract that element. Then the data was transformed to create a tidy long table. the function gets passed once per notebook extracting the data from each worksheet, building a single table with the columns for the workbook industry, the category in the tab, partner, line of business, spend, impressions, etc... IMO; ideally (if I have to check their data in excel that is), I'd like the partner to redo their report so that I received a workbook with the underlying data in a traditionally tabular form and their reporting page to use power query and table references and not cell ranges and formula. submitted by /u/TheTresStateArea [link] [comments]
Tagged with
#Excel alternatives for data analysis#generative AI for data analysis#natural language processing for spreadsheets#Excel compatibility#Excel alternatives#real-time data collaboration#rows.com#big data management in spreadsheets#conversational data analysis#financial modeling with spreadsheets#intelligent data visualization#real-time collaboration#AutoML capabilities#data visualization tools#enterprise data management#big data performance#data analysis tools#data cleaning solutions#Auto Scheduler#Excel