I love helping people with computer problems.

That would be my dream job…

This week I had the opportunity to help a friend.

One problem involved Excel–my favorite application to work with.

Melissa’s friend Kassi’s boss bought everyone in his office a FitBit and they are having a stepping contest. Kassi enters in everyone’s step counts each day into an Excel spreadsheet.

She wanted an easy way to make the spreadsheet display the cumulative totals each day and automatically arrange them in descending order so that the ‘high stepper’ is in first place.

(Not this kind of high stepper. 🙂 )

Kassi figured out a way to do it, but her solution was a bit cumbersome and she didn’t want to spend that much time on it every day.

I created a solution using a pivot table (shown in color below) which is a built-in solution within Excel that summarizes data and can perform additional functions within that summary.

What’s fun about working with people like Kassi two-fold:

• Users have to be creative enough to think that there might be a better way to do something and I love working with creative people.
• Users have to be willing to take a risk in asking for help. A lot of users either don’t feel comfortable asking or aren’t annoyed enough to bitch about having to do repetitive tasks.

So I love working with creative and efficient and bitchy people!

And what’s really wonderful to see is the curiosity to learn more that comes from this. I’ll be showing Kassi how to build her own pivot tables later today.  🙂

Thanks, Kassi!