Microsoft Office Real World Case Studies

Overview

In the training room we like to work with tried and tested examples – demonstrations and exercises that we know will work. However, it’s only when you come to use a program in anger that you really find out about it’s capabilities, it’s limitations and it’s annoyances. In this presentation Mike will provide an insight into the development of a number of real-world applications that he has built in Microsoft Office.

A fully-featured course-booking and delegate-management Access database

The requirement was for a robust, future-proof database to manage course bookings, training rooms, delegates and feedback. In addition the data is used to produce monthly Management Reports (in both Access and Excel), providing valuable information about revenue, cancellations, trainer utilisation and delegate feedback.

A multi-page questionnaire written in Excel

Although Access would have been more suitable, the customer was insistent on using Excel. A key requirement of this solution was to ensure that when a user opened the Excel file, they were unable to access the existing questionnaire responses that had already been entered, whilst at the same time allowing the “questionnaire owner” full access to the existing data.

An Excel-based custom View Manager

Learn how Range Names and a small amount of VBA were used to produce a custom View Manager, the purpose of which was to speed up data entry in an extremely large workbook.

Splitting a Mail Merge

The challenge in this solution was to build an automated Access-to-Word mailmerge application that saved each merged letter as a separate file in a specified folder. The file was then either printed or sent as an email.

Linking 25 files and counting by colour – seemed simple enough!!

25 workbooks each containing 5 worksheets…a summary sheet per workbook and a summary file. How many red cells? How many yellow cells? how many green cells? A bit of VBA and a Recalc button.. and voila – a working solution!

All are welcome and we hope to see you there.

** Special ‘After Hours’ Event **

As this is the nearest NWIITT meeting to Elaine’s birthday please join us after the main event for a coke and a bag of crisps! (ed – never let it be said we don’t know how to live it up at NWIITT!)

Date and Time

20 May 2008, 19:30 – 21:30

Presenter

Mike Thomas