alt Hacker NewsYou can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel. Samsung’s Austin fab, at least circa 2020-ish, was generating machine labels with it. These are paper cards, roughly 2” x 4”, which carry the following information:
* Machine name / number
* Owning technician’s name, shift, photo, and phone number
* Owning engineer’s name, shift, photo, and phone number
My team had something like 250 machines spread across 4 shifts. We had to redo cards anytime we gained or lost someone on any team, which often included rebalancing the workload. Luckily, someone had made an Excel macro that connected to a MSSQL DB that had employee information (IIRC, it didn’t have confidential information like pay in it; I think it was used for generating badges), pulled all of the required fields, and automatically filled the template. Send them to the printer, cut them apart, and go place them.
My contribution while there was to implement a crude pathing optimization that tried to assign contiguous machines to a given technician, to minimize the amount they had to walk for weekly checks. It kinda worked; better than nothing, anyway.
Replies
This should have either been a Word template that used mail merge to insert the data into fields or an Access form.
Checklist:
#1 Are you doing calculations?
Yes: Use a spreadsheet
No: Use another tool> You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel.
A friend of mine writes all of their correspondence in it.
>You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel.
I've never seen a better explanation of the tool than that one sentence