Thread: Simplified Report for Equipment Maintenance

Hi all, I work on a highway maintenance crew and every two weeks we have to fill out Equipment Cost Reports for every piece of equipment. There are around 20 units, with the date, mileage and hours being the only info to be updated every pay period. Rather than enter each truck separately (when I started there they printed off sheets and you filled all the info out by hand) I setup a main page where the units are listed with cells for the mileage/hours to be entered in. Each truck has its own worksheet referencing the the unit number, pay period date and the mileage/hours. You print the entire workbook to get the reports for all units.

Question #1 : my main reason for wanting to change this is because the computers at work are incredibly slow. Opening my current file takes the computer about 3-5 minutes (seriously...) Any saving done to the file freezes the computer for the same 3-5 minutes. Is there a reason why a workbook with 20 sheets would slow take so long to load/save?

Question #2 : without using VBA, is there a way to simplify this so that I just have my main page and one blank form page. When you enter the info on the main page, you can then print all the truck sheets using the blank form as a template?

Thanks for your help! cheers j

Equipment Cost Report.xls

Thanks for the reply Richard

The file is on the C: drive, the companies IT dept is non-existent and the computer is loaded with passwords that prevent any maintenance/cleanup/diagnosis of the hard drive. On any other computer that I've tried it on, the file opens instantly (created the file at home using the same version of excel as at work)

I didn't figure that the template idea would be possible without macros. I'm not at all familiar with VBA, would there be a 'simple' solution that even someone who's fairly macro-illiterate could use?

Thanks again! j

Thanks for the reply Richard, looks/works great!