Business Management ABCs

How to Win Recognition From a Boss Who Manages With Spreadsheets

It’s tough to get recognition in the office. If your boss depends on Excel spreadsheets as primary sources of management information, here are some tips to consider.

You may be receiving some of the spreadsheets your boss gets. You may even be in charge of preparing a few of those spreadsheets that your boss depends on for management information. If both you and he are getting information from spreadsheets submitted by other departments or staff, then he depends on them for that information.

But what if you were in charge of consolidating the information from all those spreadsheets? What if you assembled all that information into an Excel dashboard that you send to your boss every day?

Why, then your boss would read YOUR work first and foremost. He would rely on your dashboard as THE most important spreadsheet he receives.

Because from that dashboard, he sees all the important information he needs. Oh sure, if he has to drill down into the details, he will see the spreadsheets others prepared. But most of the time, your creation is all he needs to see.

Being gatekeeper of your boss’ spreadsheets will give you a huge advantage in the game of office politics. In these depressed times, getting more attention from your boss could add to job security.

Here’s what you can do to become that gatekeeper.

Tip #1: Consolidate the key information from multiple spreadsheets into a dashboard

Create an Excel dashboard containing the key charts and data from all the spreadsheets both you and your boss work with. Surprise him with an email containing the dashboard, to show him you are analyzing all the numbers and providing him with the critical information. And then offer to give him an updated dashboard every day.

He will now depend on you for the information, instead of going to the people who prepare the raw spreadsheets. You gain access to him, and as you know, “access is power.”

Tip #2: Offer to help him with spreadsheets you don’t get (yet)

If you know that your boss gets other spreadsheets from elsewhere in the company (but you don’t get them), ask him to get you copied on them, so you can include those on his dashboard. Find out what totals, charts, or “top n” lists he tends to scan those spreadsheets for.

Then, tell your boss that you can consolidate the key information from all those spreadsheets as well (both what you prepare and what others prepare). You can add that to the Excel dashboard you send him every day (after implementing Tip # 1). Tell him how much time you’ll save him; how he can stay on top of the numbers with the all-inclusive dashboard.

If you can do that, you become the “gatekeeper” for all spreadsheet data going to your boss. You could pre-analyze the data in all those spreadsheets, and tack on comments that make the boss aware of your incomparable analytic capabilities. Nobody else (other than he, himself) gets all that data, so only you can come up with those insightful analyses.

Tip #3: Automate the dashboard preparation

Unless you are not doing any real work, you are probably thinking: “How am I supposed to do all the extra work to consolidate those spreadsheets into a dashboard”? If you’re a programmer type, you can use little-known, built-in Excel capabilities such as the camera tool with VBA macros.

That’s it. If you can successfully implement those 3 tips, you’ll be the person who controls the spreadsheet data your boss sees. There’s a catch, though: you’d better be the first one to implement it. Because if one of your peers does this before you do, he becomes the indispensable person.

Or, look for Excelential, a new kind of software that makes Excel dashboards easy to create. With software like Excelential, it will only take you minutes to create an Excel dashboard that brings charts and tables of data together from multiple spreadsheets. And once you have the dashboard set up, it will automatically update the dashboard for you every day.

Rene Tenazas is president of Changes And Trends Software Inc., the company that owns http://www.Excelential.com The website is dedicated to the Excelential line of software products. Excelential makes Excel dashboards easy to create and maintain. Learn more about Excelential and how it can help you by visiting http://www.excelential.com/Excelential-articles.html