Creating Duplicate pages in an excel workbook

seg419 

Oh, my! The issue is that it's not mere "formatting" change that I have in mind. By "formatting" I am referring to the nicely laid out form that you ask employees to sign, verifying hours worked. That format is perfectly fine. But it's an output document.

It's an output document that is being used to dictate how you get input. THAT'S the thing I'd change. Excel is really really REALLY good at taking raw data and formatting it for a whole range of outputs. You're being asked to work with an output document as the receptor of the raw data, and are looking for ways to tweak that. But it isn't a good approach to begin with. You've heard the expression "putting lipstick on a pig"?

And, sadly, the history you recount is a big part of why you are where you are. "We've always done it this way [on paper]; it has worked just fine. We hereby give you permission to take this fancy newfangled automated ledger sheet and convert the old paper forms into it, but, please, keep the old process going just as it was. We'll let you use Excel to do the adding and multiplying, but by no means should you monkey with the process that has worked so well with paper and pencil."

You know something? Excel can do more than fool-proof adding, multiplying, dividing and subtracting. But to use it to its fullest extent, and really achieve less error-prone results, you will need to be open to reconsidering how you collect and store the "raw data"......it's not a problem producing the same output, but do you really really REALLY just want to use Excel because the result will be printed by a computer rather than contain hand-written numbers?

I'm going to spend some time to create a little bit of a demonstration of what could be, but not a lot, since it's not clear that your management is open to actually improving the process if it means changing the process.

If it's the construction business that you're in, you might explore how they'd feel if, upon getting a new power gizmo to do a job, the customer allowed them to use it, but without actually plugging it in. If it were a drill, "you can use it because the bits are sharper than our old one, but you need to turn the whole thing by hand 'because that's the way we've always done it.'"