We had a client that built a custom spreadsheet for doing employee reviews. There was a spreadsheet for each employee and they were all linked to a master spreadsheet. In year one, it worked fine. They had less than 100 employees at the time. In year 2, they had over 200 employees, the links were for last year’s spreadsheets and the master spreadsheet had over7,000 links back to all of the employee sheets. Add to that, the employee who built it was gone, and they had a serious problem. My goal was to get them through this year as easily as possible and then help them plan for next year. I took out all of the links in the master spreadsheet, wrote an MS Access program what would grab all of the spreadsheets, pull the data and then write it directly into the master spreadsheet. There were no bad links to worry about. The master spreadsheet was modified multiple times by management during the process and we were able to easily respond and adjust it. The reviews were finished on time.
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