Outreach Best Practices: Using Excel & Macros to Make Your Life Easier
Our Outreach team manages a lot of data including several crucial website domain metric checks. These checks are applied through a variety of online tools, enabling us to ensure the outreach is of quality, professional and that meets standards agreed with our clients. In this post, Luke Kay from our Finance Outreach Team, discusses the use of excel and macros to manage data.
Excel, macros and your data: A guide to making your life easier.
I am a big believer in putting as much effort into doing as little actual work as possible. I think Excel agrees.
Looking at a big black and white block of numbers and letters is daunting. Turning a haystack of information into a tidy bale and separate collection of needles (arranged by length, descending) is no easy task. Included in this article is a guide to, from my experience, the greatest time saving feature in Microsoft Excel: Macros.
What are macros?
Are you doing the same laborious Excel task regularly? If so STOP IMMEDIATELY. No one likes monotonous or repetitive work. Macros sound really technical and worryingly advanced but they are not. Macros are your friends.
As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, a macro is:
“A single instruction that expands automatically into a set of instructions to perform a particular task”
For our purposes, a simple macro is a recorded process that the computer can complete for you at the press of a button. This can be as simple as “delete columns e-h, highlight all values less than 0 in column b red and remove all duplicate values in column A from the sheet”. While this process is not difficult, if it is something you are doing on a weekly or monthly basis, having access to the entirety of it at the click of a button will not only wow your colleagues but also, save you precious time.
How will they help in Outreach?
Anything you can do in Excel, you can record as a macro and have the computer complete for you. The time that you can save by automating daily processes in this way is really useful. The main way I use this is to sort large quantities of data without looking at it.
Whether you’re receiving reports and want to format them in a specific way on a monthly or weekly basis or if you are creating reports and want to take the raw data and sort it appropriately, you can create a macro for that.
My favourite macro helps me to get a clearer and more concise view of how good a site’s backlinks are. My home-made button that takes the raw data output by a metric checker and fits it neatly into a sorted table saves me approximately 4 minutes every time I click it.
Creating a macro
After some searching, I have found that Microsoft support’s own walk through of the macro creation process is the best one (and available for you here). Once I had created one, and realised the sheer time saving potential of macros, I was hooked. I am sure you will be too.
After you have recorded your task, you can look at and pass on the code from within the Visual Basic tab. This has enabled me to share my timesaving buttons with the rest of the team by copy-pasting the code and emailing it across to them.
As a final note; Excel is such a widely used platform, if you have a good understanding of the basics but are frustrated that you cannot perform the task at hand as efficiently as you would like, use the great pool of collected knowledge available online. Every problem I have ever encountered on Excel, someone else has encountered before and solved, and posted an extensive document outlining how they solved it.
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