What do they teach them nowadays?

[andrewducker]

laserboy was given an assignment that meant going through 28000 records in a spreadsheet and merging duplicates together.  He asked for help, as that's a horrific job that would take weeks of mindnumbing work (and involve numerous errors along the way).

So I wrote some VBA to do it for him - which took me 45 minutes - and would have taken 20, if I hadn't forgotten most of my VBA...

There really ought to be an easy way of getting in contact with a freelance coder and getting them to do simple tasks for cheap.  We have a Business Programming Team at work, who do this - but if you're a teeny company that's not terribly viable as an option.

Comments

But there is ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... lots of people on the web, such as Mr.Excel (http://www.mrexcel.com/consult.shtml) who will do Excel consulting etc. for a fee. He's put up several pages of Excel tips and tricks and at the foot of each page he has an ad offering to implement these (or other excel/office work).

alexmc has/had a consultancy for "real work" and for "fannish IT" stuff, but his pages haven't been updated for a while and some of the links are broken (http://www.sflink.net/ and http://www.owal.co.uk)

I'm sure there are numerous sites out there on the web where you can register as a freelance coder and pick up tiny programming jobs (probably something like Craigslist does this too) http://edinburgh.craigslist.org/

Re: But there is ...

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Gosh i didn't know Edinburgh had a Craigslist!!!!

[drplokta]

http://www.elance.com/

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the help. The excel helpsites are not particularly accessible for the non-programmers of the world, and there were several internal complicating factors that I won't mention here.

Feels good to get it out of the way in time for Hogmanay. :-)

Many thanks again. I'll no doubt write more on the work situation later.

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

I thought that that's what Rent A Coder was for?

[chillies.livejournal.com]

I was looking for a similar site & found www.noagenciesplease.com