Recently a subscriber sent me in an email with a template they use to print cheques with a printer, rather than hand write them out. This person had a good memory and could remember most of the supplier codes from their accounting system, so he set up autocorrect on his machine so that when he entered the code for a supplier, it automatically changed it to the suppliers name – an excellent use of Excel to save time. The only downside I had, which I forgot to tell him, is that this only works on his machine – the autocorrect settings are specific to your machine. Maybe an alternative would have been to had a database with all the codes and the supplier names, and then use a VLOOKUP formula to look up the customer name and insert the supplier name.
What happened though was that we actually identified another time saver for him, and that was to use a custom function to actually convert the value, or number into the written words automatically with Excel. We used a custom function that was already available and modified it to suit the needs of as many people possible, and made it available free of charge on our website.
So go along to the site and look out for our Spell Numbers into Words Excel template, download and try it out. I’d love to hear in the comments below how you plan to use this function – are there applications other than cheque automation?
Article by Matthew Steele – LinkedIn Profile
