So, most of my daily work involves faxing stupid ass reminders to morons who have committed to giving money for the troglodyte candidates I work for.

I keep a spreadsheet of commitments in excel. Is there a way to flag individual for follow up within a spreadsheet?

i.e. -- Chase/WG $500 (talked to on 4/5)
FT/WG $500 (talked to on 3/29)

I would have to follow up with Chase on 4/9, and FT on 4/3 and again on 4/8...is there a way for the computer to alert me to this shit? or should I just stick with doing it manually?

Outlook is better suited for reminders. Best you can do in Excel is have a separate follow-up worksheet sorted by date.

I've never really used Outlook, but is there a way to link database stuff to it? Or should I consider a DB program with this capability?
Can you rec a good one?

if you were detemined to use excel, you could write an If/Then clause that applied conditional formatting to a cell based upon duration from a certain date. you'd still have to look at the whole thing to see which ones were a different color or something to know who to attack.

Yeah, you could maybe also have an If/Then comparing a column with Contact Them dates and then manually enter in the date every day, where it compared the two and if today was =/later than that date, it'd.... somethin. Just buy a $99 Palm Pilot already, you monster.

i'm determined to use what works. Ideally, i'd like the to automate the whole bugger. Like run a program where it picked out who to attack, as you so brilliantly put it chase, and then printed a letter with who/how much etc..then, and this gets even trickier, it would fax em off.

I could live with doing the faxes manually. And even the merging manuall, if it would generate a list each day when I ran the program.

I know this is possible, and its not uber necessary now, but by this time next year, or even October of this year, it will

an iF/then macro could probably be created with color formatting (as already stated) and then you could probably do a sort and then print out the list you would need to contact for the day...basically, what the other guys have said.

You could also try posting the question here. They are usually quick to respond and are very creative with solutions.

http://www.mrexcel.com/board2/

Conditional formatting sucks, and working with "time" in excell generally sucks a lot; but I agree, it's your most likely answer for excel. Outlook is your better solution, or anything with Gant charts, like MS Project.

this is probably very easy but may require that you move to a database. how invested are you in this spreadsheet and are you going to be exclusively doing this on a mac?

Hey, Loog, I'm not really familiar with your work situation. Are you working from a public computer(or a network) that other people(the troglodyte candidates and others) can access?

Since it sounds like you have MS Office, this is what I'd do: Put your info in Access, then set up a report that you could run each morning, printing off the donors in need of a reminder that day, along with their phone #s, kids names, and most effective lean tactic.

Access is not so bad as people often say. You can make your database as simple as an excel spreadsheet, or really go all out and make entry forms, buttons, etc...

i agree. it's not perfect but it does what you want, more or less.

ACT would probably be a good program for that.
I don't know much about it, but our marketing department would use this to call potential clients and then follow up at the times when the potential client said they might have something for us.

I bet you could even get a program that would automatically transfer the excel data, to your 'printed reminder' document, and fax it over the internet.

For some reason I don't seem to have access on Office 2004. I guess by mentioning Excel I shaded the repsonses, because what I really menat was. I now use excel, but understand that I want to do may require a change of programs.



I use my own computer, with my passwords, etc...Or I wouldn't even probably be on obner during the day.



Because a palm pilot doesn't really do what I need this for. This is for reminding me whom to send faxes to on a daily basis, and many times its like 25-30 people, and later on in the larger campaign I will go run it will be in the 100s.

Sure it will. This is what a lot of professional-types use them for. And this is why they're coming with lotsa memory these days. You do most of the work on the pc, entering in contacts and dates, and the upload it. Bada bing. Those things are tailored towards managing large contact groups and performing tasks / reminders based on dates and times. It's gotta be at least as easy if not easier than tackling Access from scratch.

Consider.

Yea but why would you bring in another device to something that one can do on it's own?

Sounds like he can't do it as-is. Or if he can do it w/ his computer, he's gonna have to either learn how to use Access or buy some hefty software. Which he may well wanna do, I don't know. But saying the Palm won't do it is probably wrong, I think. It sounded like the simplest answer posed so far.

For the size that this thing will become, and the fact that we will have to network it, eventually, it will become important to have it on a drive, or whatever. I'm gonna need to become versed in DBing much mnore than I am now, and the reason is that the next campaign I am on is going to much bigger, and call for a different level of organization than I am used to.

I understand where you're coming from, Ky, and appreciate the suggestion, but I think it'd be better to keep it on my cpu.

I hear ya. Sounds like it's gonna be huge.


Sen. Donate-Big LooGar

Y'all have experience with Filemaker Pro at all? According to my pops you basically design the fields and possibilities yourself. Seems like i could figure it out if I had to, and that it would make life easier. Especially since everything I used on last year's campaign and this year's campaign will be directly connectable to next year's.

My wife used that crap. I'll ask her about it if I get a chance, and remember. I only have 2 more days left with her, so my mind ain't on software.

Did you look into using ACT!