Combine data from 4 workbooks and then export filtered data to individual files?

Hello group!

I am new to Excel macros and VB and working my way through this! I need to create individual Excel files for each of our resources to fill in their timesheets every week and wanted to find a faster/easier way to do it. I take the data from 4 separate excel files (project plans), combine the data into one, and then filter by person in order to copy/paste each person's data into separate excel files.

Does anyone have any good strategies for automating this? It was fine doing it manually when we had 6 people, but we're up to about 20 now and it's getting out of hand!

Thanks for your help!

Hi, womanket.

Macros can be confusing when you first start. I suggest you try recording some macros (try to ensure you are using relative references, or the macro will be hard-wired to specific ranges) and then examine the macro to learn how they work.

It is not difficult to copy data from several worksheets onto one, and you can easily record a sort. Following is a link to some other tips on recording macros:
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows...ce-excel-2010/

I often record a short macro to see what the recorder offers in order to discover the commnads needed. Another tool which can help is the object browser (select View/Object browser from the VB editor), as is the immediate window, which will let you experiment with some of the commands. Note that in the immediate window, you use "?" to print a line into the immediate window. thus, if you type Range("A1").Value, you will get an error, but ?Range("A1").Value will return the value in A1.

Once you have some code, you step through it from the VB editor using F8 to execute a step at a time, and you can see the value of any variables from the Locals window. You can also watch what happens on the spreadsheet, if you are movving around or writing to the sheets.

As you get better at coding, you will find that it's really more efficient to read data into variables and arrays, and then process those as needed and finaaly read the results back into a sheet as needed.

There are a number of good resources to assist you in learning this. here are a few I'd recommend (in addition to this forum):
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/mainpage.aspx
Excellent site, many examples.
http://www.decisionmodels.com/calcsecretsj.htm
UDFs (and other subjects)
http://www.contextures.com/tiptech.html
General Excel Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, including video tutorials
http://www.ozgrid.com/forum/index.php?
Another forum. Same comment as above.
http://excelvbatutor.com/vba_tutorial.html
Tutorials.
http://vbautomation.110mb.com/VBA/beginner_basic.htm (May be defunct)


Hope this helps.

If you need some more specific help with the project you are working on, feel free to post an example of what you are working with & what you are after & I'm sure folks on this forum will be willing to help.

Thanks, gjcase! I'll take a look at these sites and see if I can master some macros. Appreciate the advice!