I will be the first to tell you that I am not a coder. I do consider myself a documentation specialist, though. I was tasked with creating a consultant score card that led me down several Google searches to get it to work properly.
The template is easy and basic. You need to list the client, date, and manager at the top. The middle section is a table with a row for each consultant. The manager rates each consultant 1-5 in three categories: Productivity, Quality, and Professionalism. There is a column for the average and one final column for comments.
I did not want anyone to have to manually calculate the average, so I had to research how to add the formula to a table in Word. Formulas are easy in Excel but kind of a pain in Word. Well, why not just embed an Excel sheet within the Word doc, you ask? That's an even bigger pain because you have to open Excel to make updates. Too complex. So I figured out how to calculate the average. I put the formula in the proper cells. You put the cursor in the cell and hit F9, and poof, it calculates. I thought that was pretty nifty, but the feedback from the SVP was can I make it auto-calculate. Back to Google.
The short answer is that Word doesn't have functionality that will auto-calculate in real-time. I was able to create a macro that essentially mimics the act of placing the cursor and hitting F9. I was also able to create a button in the header of that column that triggers the macro when double-clicked. This functionality actually works pretty well as long as someone doesn't go rogue with inputs in that particular column. I tried using protection on the document, but that was messing with the macro.
In the end, this is 1.0 made from scratch, and I think we can live with it for the time being.
The template is easy and basic. You need to list the client, date, and manager at the top. The middle section is a table with a row for each consultant. The manager rates each consultant 1-5 in three categories: Productivity, Quality, and Professionalism. There is a column for the average and one final column for comments.
I did not want anyone to have to manually calculate the average, so I had to research how to add the formula to a table in Word. Formulas are easy in Excel but kind of a pain in Word. Well, why not just embed an Excel sheet within the Word doc, you ask? That's an even bigger pain because you have to open Excel to make updates. Too complex. So I figured out how to calculate the average. I put the formula in the proper cells. You put the cursor in the cell and hit F9, and poof, it calculates. I thought that was pretty nifty, but the feedback from the SVP was can I make it auto-calculate. Back to Google.
The short answer is that Word doesn't have functionality that will auto-calculate in real-time. I was able to create a macro that essentially mimics the act of placing the cursor and hitting F9. I was also able to create a button in the header of that column that triggers the macro when double-clicked. This functionality actually works pretty well as long as someone doesn't go rogue with inputs in that particular column. I tried using protection on the document, but that was messing with the macro.
In the end, this is 1.0 made from scratch, and I think we can live with it for the time being.
