Forum Discussion
How to create a report based on a dynamic list of sheets?
Excel has some excellent tools for summarizing data (as you know)
It works most readily, most easily, most seemlessly, when you take those summaries from a single database (or maybe from two or more that can be joined by key data elements such as SSN (in the case of employee databases))
What makes it harder is when you're working from separate sheets, such as you're describing here.
But it sounds like those separate, individual sheets come FROM a single data source. So I want to ask, before you solve this the hard way, is it possible to go back in the sequence of events here, to create this "single view of hourly reports" from that original source of data?
[FWIW, during my career, I was the director of the HR/Payroll database for a major corporation, so I've "been there, done that." One of my specialties was being able to use SQL to extract data from an IBM DB2 database, into Excel, where I could use Pivot Tables and other Excel tools to summarize raw data into the form of useful management reports. There were occasions when the IT professionals were relying on brute force programming routines to summarize data, and I was able to use built-in Excel functions to accomplish the same results, faster, more reliably.]
Thanks for the response mathetes,
Sadly, I do not have access/permissions to the source DB and am stuck consuming the reports as they are exported.
One of your opening sentences, in your first post, was this "When I export this list from our system, it places each individual's information in their own sheet within excel," which suggests you at the very least have access to run this set of reports, and (implicitly) access to the data that is involved.
So I'll grant that you may not have the kind of master access that I had as the overall DB director, but I was able to grant views to divisional or location HR professionals to certain views of data they needed. It sounds like you do have that kind of access, albeit somewhat limited.
Based on what you've said, I'd encourage you to go to whoever it is that manages the whole system to see if you could be granted some kind of export of this very same data, just in a different format that would enable the kind of summary you're looking for. It would be a lot easier (and, importantly, less error prone) than reconstructing the raw data from the individual and variable sheets.
It's a submit form. I select the dates, click generate report and it comes back as HTML pages. There is an export button that I can click that then exports each of these pages to an excel document with all the sheets. That's my limited access to the data, no way to interface directly with the data outside of the form they provide. The "system" being the time reporting application provided.
