Spreadsheet design?

Cianos

A friend of mine seems to have a talent for constructing and maintaining spreadsheets. I was wondering if there is a "job" that entails creating efficient spreadsheets for companies on a freelance basis, or are there professional firms that provide such a service that he could get in contact with?

As you can see I need to be pointed in the right direction

Any help appreciated
Cian

dbnavan

Never heard of such a position, anyone with a half decent knowledge of spreadsheets can put a fairly complex looking one together, mainly it would fall to a company secretary to do them.

zAbbo

dbnavan wrote:

Never heard of such a position, anyone with a half decent knowledge of spreadsheets can put a fairly complex looking one together, mainly it would fall to a company secretary to do them.

Depends how complex you mean, I certainly wouldn't expect the company secretary to create a 'complex' spreadsheet.

Some of the stuff I’ve worked on includes in depth statistical knowledge and would fall under Business/IT department’s responsibility.

Ask your friend to look into business analysis / forecasting / resource planning.

dbnavan

zabbo wrote:

Depends how complex you mean, I certainly wouldn't expect the company secretary to create a 'complex' spreadsheet.

Some of the stuff I’ve worked on includes in depth statistical knowledge and would fall under Business/IT department’s responsibility.

Ask your friend to look into business analysis / forecasting / resource planning.

True, depends how complex you mean. Although my mam is a Secretary and I have tutored ECDL and she would put certain spreadsheets together quicker then me.

rick_fantastic

i think by complex he means programming macros and the likes

Cianos

I dont know anything about them myself, but it does sound like he has a knack at them.

Since going in to the company he has made a really good spreadsheet that has eased the workload for at least 4 employees sufficiently. At the start it was just to make his own life easier but it has kind of spread out a bit.

Maybe it was just the company not having a good system in place beforehand, but then again it is a Japanese pharmaceuticals company:o

Either way I think its worth a shot for him to look into this a bit further.

What should his first step be would anyone know?

TempestSabre

Doing simple spread sheets is one thing. But starting you would really need to do all the MOUS qualifications in Excel. Then get some VB/VBA/VB.Net programming under your belt to take it further. You see jobs for excel people now and then. Heres one for example.

http://www.recruitireland.com/job/?JobID=2401708

In doing work for pharmaceuticals and financial companies you'd need to be aware of Computer Validation Compliance for the Pharmaceutical Industry. 21 CFR Part 11.

http://www.piribo.com/publications/it_ehealth/CRC009.html

At the end of the day if you can get the work thats all that matters. I've done a bit of contract work for Financial and Pharmaceuticals companies in the past, doing Office Automation, Word, Excel, VB, Access, SQL etc. A lot of programmers don't want to go near it as they kinda look down on VBA/Macro's. But it can be powerful stuff. To do it well you need to be a good programmer and be able to learn and use the various object models.

Decent money in it sometimes. The financial companies can be demanding to work for.

antoinolachtnai

If he has the head for numbers, he could work as a financial analyst of some sort. It's not the knowledge of excel that really matters, it's the ability to apply it to some domain. It's also important to make sure your work is appreciated as such.

I knew a guy once who had set up excel spreadsheets that were being used to run the maintenance schedules of the rail network in a major western european country. He was literally the only guy on staff who had in-depth understanding of how the whole maintenance operation fitted together. Got fired two rounds of redundancies ago.

As a general IT rule, you should never set up an important system with more than one user in Excel, certainly not in a company with more than 10 employees. It works, but it just isn't the right way to do things.

If this guy doesn't know accounting, and isn't going to become a big-shot programmer, he should get some sort of financial qualification. I would suggest he do the ACCA Diploma in Financial Management. Part-time, takes a year or two.

damnyanks

Spreadsheets are huge. Place I work has dozen's of teams creating special spreadsheets for finacnial calculations and so on.