kenpuls
Member Since: 2004/12/23
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Full Biography

My name is Ken, and I am a Certified Management Accountant in Canada. My full time job is as the Accounting Supervisor and Systems Administrator of a resort on Vancouver Island, BC, where we have a golf course, 30 room hotel, 400 berth marina, 3 food & beverage outlets, and a whole bunch of bare land to develop.

When I first started at the resort in 1999, we upgraded all our office systems to Excel 97, and my users panicked. The "macros" we ran all stopped working, and when I passed that back to our head office in Toronto, I had to explain what they did, step by step. "Well... you click on the first cell, press the / key, hold down shift and hit page down twice... then you press CTRL C..." LOL! We resolved it by turning the Lotus 123 transition keys to ON, but head office thought they had a better way. In July of 1999, they sent us our first file that actually DID use a macro, built by a summer student.

As happens with summer students, this one went back to school, and then we needed to change something... and being the only systems guy in the company who knew Excel at all, guess who got the task (even head office didn't have anyone at that point). Basically all I did after that was update the file whenever it needed it.

In early 2001, I began recording simple macros, mainly just to copy closing balances to opening balance columns and clear out data entry fields. This continued in until late 2002.

In the fall of 2002, our higher ups decided to cut labour costs in the administration department. We cut 2.5 full time equivalent positions out of a 7.5 person office (yes 33% of our labour) within 1 month, and were expected to produce the same amount and quality of work. (And due to our management company being absorbed into another in early 2002, our IT deparment had become a one man show -- me!) During a desperate shuffle of tasks to other departments, and dropping of tasks that were low priority, I suddenly recorded my first macro.

And from there, I launched myself into VBA full force. With the automation that I have been able to accomplish, I firmly believe that I have managed to save our company between $20,000 and $40,000 in labour per year. (Not cutting any more, but we are able to perform virtually the same task load as before we had our cuts.) Suffice it to say, I love VBA, and am still amazed by the things it can do.

I am also an administrator (under the ID kpuls) at VBA Express, a website devoted specifically to helping users implement VBA solutions.

You can find VBA Express at                          http://www.vbaexpress.com/forum/
Information to contact me can be found at      http://www.vbaexpress.com/forum/member.php?u=573
Or you can visit me at my own website at       http://www.excelguru.ca

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