Need help with excel assessment tool /data base for farming!

Greetings Excel Forum!

I am a new time poster/old time excel user. I've used this website many, many times for help and tips with using excel. Thank you for taking the time to help me out

I was wondering if someone could guide me on what I should do for a "Assessment" tool that I need to create for my farm. I'll try my best to summarize what I need:

Since it's not exactly easy to bring laptops onto farms, the current process is to take a "assessment" work paper (Typically asking YES, NO), scan to a pdf, and attach the pdf to an excel document (as a database).

Seeing that we make multiple re-assessments throughout the year, but ask the same questions, here is what was suggested: after the assessment paper worksheet was made, we would then transfer the data to a excel worksheet. Then, after the data is plugged into a worksheet, a "summary" or "database" worksheet will then help evaluate the overall status of the farm. The "summary" worksheet would have to be able to accept new worksheets that are added every time a new assessment is made and brought in.

I have very limited VBA experience but that was what someone recommended to me to add. Others were also web based application so at this point, I'm open to any help I can get.

Thanks again for reading through this and, more importantly the help.

Have a great day!

Jordon Spronk

Pretty broad 'question'!!

It's hard to offer specific advice, without having a clearer picture of your actual requirements...

But allow me to offer one bit of guidance, as you're essentially starting with a clean sheet:

O.A.P.

Organise, Analyse, Present.

Organise: Think about how best to structure your data - when you input your raw assessment data (whether from scanned PDFs, manual input, other input methods), get it stored in a format which is logical, and easy to manipulate and refer to. Think about using each row to store one unique piece of data, and which column 'fields' are needed to describe that piece of data. Forget about doing any calculations or making pretty at this stage, get a solid source of data. And leave it alone... Which bring us to:

Analyse. Your business logic, rules, calculations, aggregations should be performed with your data, not to it. That is, add extra information to your data - don't replace it. Once source data is changed, it's really hard to get back. So, refer to the source data, to perform the manipulations you need, in another place (another worksheet, or workbook, for example.)

Present. Once you have organised your data, analysed it to get the information you need from it, then think about presenting it - and again, keep this separate from the Organise (Data) and Analyst (Manipulate / Calculate) stages.


A typical workbook / project using these principles will have (a) 'Raw Data' worksheet(s), with some code to bring that data in. Then (a) 'Staging' worksheet(s), where aggregation, pivot tables, calculations are performed. Then the 'Report' sheet(s), with the pretty stuff which you present to the information consumers.


Wow - bit of a ramble! But, many of the questions asked on here are caused from people not structuring their projects well in the first place, and trying to manipulate data which is stored in 'pretty' presentation form. You're in a good place, where you can get the design right first time.

I wonder if my advice was in any way helpful?!