Case Study

The Database
A Company came to Utilio with an Access database that contained 15,000 business addresses held in one single Access table. The data in the table had not been 'normalised' to reduce data redundancy. Annually this database was used to create a printed directory.

The Problem
The Company had to go through all 15,000 records in the database, sort them into their correct categories, sort the businesses by county, and then paste them into MS Word. The records were then sorted alphabetically before finally being added to Quark for publishing. However, as some of the Company's clients wished to be listed in a number of different categories, their record had to be located a second time before its details could be copied and pasted into the additional category.

The Solution
Utilio wrote a VBA script that automated every process of extraction, sorting, and categorising, before finally generating an automated 150 page MS Word document that could easily be imported into Quark.

The directory's formatting attributes requested by the Company's design-team were applied by Utilio's VBA script while the directory was still in MS Word format.

What had previously taken 1 week to accomplish (with the potential of human error) could now be achieved flawlessly by clicking a button and waiting 15 minutes (the time it took for VBA to process and print the records). Best of all, the Company can now use the script every year to generate their directory.