#16 - The Sheet 📃
How I automate order numbers to save me hours🛒📈
Hey Friends,
Welcome back to the Sheet!
Here’s what to expect in today’s edition:
📋 Summary:
💡 The Sheet Tip (How I automate order numbers 🛒📈)
🎵 How I focus (Music that’s helping me focus this week)
=💡 The Sheet Tip (How I automate order numbers 🛒📈)
If you run a small business, you might rely on Excel to keep track of your orders, for example, you might sell brownies to local businesses! (YUM)
Each time you get a new order, you manually type in a new order number, along with the number of units sold.
What if there was a way for the order number to ‘auto-populate’ when you fill in the number of units sold?
To do this we will use a combination of the SEQUENCE and COUNTA formulas.
Step 1 - Calculate the total number of orders
Use the CountA function which counts the number of non-blank cells Type the following: =Counta(C:C)-1
C:C means we will count everything in column C, and minus 1 is to account for title (# Units) which we don’t want to be counted in our number of orders.
Step 2 - Use the SEQUENCE command to auto-populate your order number
Delete the existing order numbers, and in the first row of your table type the SEQUENCE formula and set the number of rows to equal the total number of orders which we calculated in step 1, =SEQUENCE(D4)
Step 3 - Automation!
Simply type the number of units in the next row and the order number will automatically populate!
If you want to learn more advanced uses of the SEQUENCE formula, leave a comment below. If there’s enough interest I’ll cover it in another edition of ‘The Sheet’
=🎵 How I focus (Music that’s helping me focus this week)
If you’ve been anything like me this week, it’s been a real battle to focus and stay productive. When this happens I find two things generally help me to get back on track:
Journalling - Writing in my daily journal helps me to process my thoughts and identify my top 3 priorities for the day. I find that once I’ve mentally unloaded onto paper I can better focus on the tasks at hand for the day. I use a technique known as morning pages, which I first came across in Tim Ferris’ blog back in 2015 (Link here).
Music - I find that music really helps me to ‘get in the zone’. This week I’ve been hooked on a one-hour handpan music mix on YouTube. It’s a bit different from my usual Low-Fi mix but has really helped me stay productive.
That’s it for this week.
See you next week.
The Functional Excel Team