W
wendii
Guest
I just discovered this nifty tool for repeating projects, and thought I would share in case it's useful to anyone else.
I work in recruitment and though each case is different, the process and timelines are all the same. For example, draft ads have to be with the agency wednesday before publication. Application packs have to be ready for publication day, which mean sending them to the printers two days before publication, which means proof reading them the day before they go to the printers, and so on and so on. We have a timeline written out, and we enter in the hard dates - publication, and interviews and work from there out.
The aim was to get the timeline from being a piece of paper in a file to being on people's diaries, where they could be amalgamated, shared and checked off more easily.
First I transfered the timeline into Excel, using the hard dates to work the other days out by simple addition. Then I used the following formula (stolen shamelessly from a web page I now can't remember) to make sure all the dates were weekdays;
=WORKDAY(E12,1*OR(WEEKDAY(E12)={7,1}))
Then I named the range which contains the actions and the dates. Before they are transfered a quick find replace gives the users a reference number and an action.
Next... go to outlook. Import from Excel and map across the data. Easy peasy japaneasy there are your actions in your calendar!
Personally, I prefer to have them in my task list and I shall do this too, but corporately they wanted them in the calendar, so that's what I did.
Hope this helps someone.
Wendii
I work in recruitment and though each case is different, the process and timelines are all the same. For example, draft ads have to be with the agency wednesday before publication. Application packs have to be ready for publication day, which mean sending them to the printers two days before publication, which means proof reading them the day before they go to the printers, and so on and so on. We have a timeline written out, and we enter in the hard dates - publication, and interviews and work from there out.
The aim was to get the timeline from being a piece of paper in a file to being on people's diaries, where they could be amalgamated, shared and checked off more easily.
First I transfered the timeline into Excel, using the hard dates to work the other days out by simple addition. Then I used the following formula (stolen shamelessly from a web page I now can't remember) to make sure all the dates were weekdays;
=WORKDAY(E12,1*OR(WEEKDAY(E12)={7,1}))
Then I named the range which contains the actions and the dates. Before they are transfered a quick find replace gives the users a reference number and an action.
Next... go to outlook. Import from Excel and map across the data. Easy peasy japaneasy there are your actions in your calendar!
Personally, I prefer to have them in my task list and I shall do this too, but corporately they wanted them in the calendar, so that's what I did.
Hope this helps someone.
Wendii