#Design menu in excel 2016 for mac update#

(If you want to know why, take a gander at this: “Why I’m Using an Excel 2016 Spreadsheet to Manage Data“).

Now was not the time to reinvent the wheel or build something new in SharePoint.

Which is not a huge deal, until you start adding up the time to update all of these when a new client started working with us, and time others spend searching for where I stored these lists.)

(At that point in time, we had a workbook to track Christmas Cards, another workbook to track Event invitations, a OneNote table to track invitees to our Office 365 Lunch and Learns, another table to track New Client Suite Night invites, etc. My immediate thought was: “If we had ONE list to rule them all, that tracked ALL the information in one spot, I’d only have to keep one location up to date.” And, if a new client did not receive a card because of a data entry error, I’d feel like Ebenezer Scrooge.

Even with some of the tools available in Excel to assist with this task, at the end of the day I don’t trust robots to do a human’s job. Alas, I had not, and now I faced merging data. If I had added the column in the SharePoint list, I’d be able to export a fresh list with two mouse clicks. I struggle to recall why I decided to store data in a separate Excel spreadsheet. I had produced a quick result, that made more work for my future self. (Aren’t I a gem?) To be clear, this reaction was NOT directed at Darren’s request, but at myself for not working smart, and being inefficient.

When I realized the amount of work that would need to be done to update and validate the data to make sure it was clean, free of duplicates, and not missing anyone, this was my immediate reaction: Client Address (ok, this was more like 6 columns, but I want this blog to be #KISS)Īfter exporting the information, I saved the file to our Marketing SharePoint library and added a column in the Excel worksheet for “Receive Card?” with three choices: “Yes, No, To Be Determined.”.The original worksheet was created using a simple Export to Excel from a SharePoint list with three columns visible: The idea was we could reuse the 2015 list for our 2016 mail-out, after adding the 30+ new clients we started working with this year.

Our General Manager, Darren, asked me to track down the Excel workbook we used last year to determine which clients receive Christmas Cards and then create a mail merge to print labels with their addresses to use on the card envelopes. Here’s some back story to give it context: When using Excel today, I hit a roadblock and found a solution that I want to share.

#Design menu in excel 2016 for mac update#