Microsoft Excel Support, Design and Development, Adelaide, South Australia

CypherBYTE has been designing, developing and supporting customised Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for Australian businesses since 1992.

A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is essentially a large, flexible, scientific calculator set out in a table-matrix format. Because a spreadsheet is essentially a gigantic 3D table, you can use them in many ways, but by far the most common use is for recording financial information and building financial models. You can create formulas in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and that is the strength of any spreadsheet. Because of it's flexibility, you can very quickly create nice lists of data and/or mathematical models. From there, you can analyse data in many ways, including creating charts.

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can become quite complex and when they do, you can either work your way through the complexities yourself (if you are thus inclined) or you can opt to call someone else in to work through the complexities for you, or even with you in the form of Microsoft Excel Training. Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can become complex enough to also warrant automation - automatic procedures (macros) that simplify common tasks.

When your spreadsheet gets to the point where you are thinking that there MUST be an easier way or you recognise that the complexities are getting too much for you to handle, or maybe you just plain and simple get stuck, you would benefit from consultation, support or development of your custom spreadsheet. Spreadsheets can be designed and developed in similar ways to Microsoft Access databases and in fact, most Excel spreadsheets eventually become custom software development jobs or custom database designs because of the limitations of a spreadsheet.

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet design and development support can include:

Designing and developing complete Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Supporting the development of complex formulas and functions.
Supporting the development of charts.
Designing and developing data lists and macros that utilise them.
Troubleshooting.
Implementing complex filtering.
Creating or modifying custom forms.
Development of command buttons, macros and other automation tasks.
Simplification of interaction tasks between several large spreadsheets.
Converting spreadsheets to custom software applications. This is our speciality!

There are some limitations to using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that you might not know:

Everything is handled in memory, so the larger the spreadsheet the slower it gets to open, save and work in.
There is currently a maximum of 16,384 columns.
There is currently a maximum of 1,048,576 rows.
Although Microsoft Excel can use lookup functions, there is no such thing as a relationship between data elements.
The development environment is nowhere near as powerful as something like a Microsoft Access database.
A custom function can only return a value, it cannot manipulate spreadsheet content in any way, for that you need a custom subprocedure, which cannot return a value.

In cases where we 100% believe that the best way to go is conversion to Microsoft Access and you insist that the work is to be done in Microsoft Excel, we are currently turning down such work. The reason behind this is the frequent occurence of spending significant amounts of time and effort to build such spreadsheets and then aftewards, see the decision to convert to Microsoft Access, which should have been done in the first place. Since the time spent on developing such spreadsheets in this scenario is a total loss, it seems to be a complete waste of time to take on such jobs. We're sure another company will take your money if you really insist on perservering with such a project, but it won't be us! ;-)

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