Hello Campers, I’m completely new here and I read an article describing (In great detail, thanks for that) how someone got a job. I realized that telling a bit about my most recent accomplishment may help others to realize theirs. Please excuse the poor grammar and /or spelling as typing is a skill reserved for others.
Story
So as a Robot Service Technician / factory Maintenance for over 10 years and working in a factory in some capacity for the 10 years before that. I had very little time to catch the internet craze. I was the perfect age to get in early as it blew up while i was a teen to busy playing Rock and Roll to pay attention. Needless to say I had always figured there was simply no way to ever catch up. Then i took a job as a salesman and in doing so got my first desk job! It was a scary move as it was less money and i was now more or less at ground zero career wise. I arrived to work the first day and received my laptop and a copy of MS Office and was basically told GO!.. of course i asked "where’s the program that i use to…’ I didn’t even know what the SOP was for a sales man but as i started calling people and taking down contact info and notes i quickly had a spreadsheet that was made of various iterations or and organizational plan that I had kept changing and up dating to suit needs It was messy but i could retrieve information more or less on demand.
As the job progressed i found myself constantly busy doing menial tasks just to accomplish what should be a simple thing. like sending out samples or confirming an orders status. everything required an email with current information and the whole world was a cover your ass email chain that had taken a serious toll on my Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keys. I kept asking myself aren’t we in the range of information ? This can’t be what all those other office jobs are all about? So i endeavored to do what i did best which is to automate!
But where to begin? Easy I started with formulas in Excel. I had multi sheet array formulas doing estimates and moving information from hidden sheets used as tiny databases. I was learning how to youtube a bit more efficiently. Reading textbooks tends to make me sleep in a few seconds so youtube was a very refreshing change for me. I quickly learned that anything in MS Office can be manipulated through Macros and I had a couple great ones going which was when i tried to email the spreadsheet and learned that Macros are seen as viruses by pretty much anything that’s outside the sheet itself. so I was stuck, not learning not improving and i had Identified the potential time savings by this point so I was not giving up. which is when i found Google Sheets. Limited, apparently, but I wasn’t trying to forecast agriculture futures on from some giant data set,.I just didn’t want to have to copy and paste the same contact info 10 times a day. Whats this Google Apps Script ? As it turned out our email was run by Google using at the time Google Apps for work and the whole universe which is google opened up, HUGE!
So i automated sample requests, Contact Us follow ups i even built a sales team CRM of sorts that could be used by my boss to keep track of our progress and leads. I learned a ton from various online tutorials and left the company to start my own website. Of course I made it way too big but I had found Wordpress and the plugins all promised to do it all and little did i know they could as long as there was absolutely nothing else happening. ( For every plugin installed in word press a separate CSS JS file is loaded for every page weather it’s used or not :S). Sigh , It became big and impossible to run a business that size. So now I’m about to launch my newly rebuilt still on Wordpress inspite of having learned a lot about CSS and HTML I never took the time to create one from scratch to the point of release. But I did just figure out how to get Woocommerce to send me Order Data to Google Spreadsheets as the orders are made which took no small amount of trial and error. I’m at version 205 at the moment and Super proud of myself for having done that. Now that i have the data i can build all the follow ups and contact info logs that i need and even have emails sent automatically from Gmail. I love finding ways to improve and save people time. It’s the core value of my company. I’ve learned a lot of new ways to solve old problems. But more then that I like to think that I’m selling the one thing that can’t be bought. Time. I have a lot left to learn and I’m looking forward to doing so and i hope to be able to find the time to take some formal training at some point. Dare i say even pursue a Career in the IT field.
Moral of the story ? Google has run out of programmers and offers so much training online that even though they are considered the Big Bad enemy by some I will be forever grateful. Hopefully this site proves to be as useful. Thanks for reading sorry if it was a bit anti climactic (Just wrote a little script clearing out some named ranges in a spreadsheet over a phone call while writing this! I Love google sheets! ).
Cheers
Here’s the code to that
function onOpen() {
SpreadsheetApp.getUi()
.createMenu("L&M Supplies")
.addItem('Clear Sheet', 'clearSheet')
.addItem('New Customer Sheet', 'createNew')
.addToUi();
}
function clearSheet(){
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var JUICE = ss.getSheetByName('Juice_Template');
console.log(JUICE);
var userAreas = JUICE.getNamedRanges();
for ( var i=0; i<userAreas.length; i++){
var userArea = userAreas[i].getRange().breakApart().clearContent();
}
}