hairdresser needs help

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
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Guest

I am a hairdresser and rent a station at a local salon. I am having trouble
keeping track of my business, clients, etc. and have no idea what to
download or which way to go. I am not familiar with spreadsheets and the
like, but want to learn so I can keep better track of my business. Does
anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks for your time.
 
I would suggest the simplest tool to use would be access (as long as the data
size does not get excessive). Get yourself a book and start reading. A short
business management course would be worthwhile as well.
 
Hi Princessupdo!

If you will post an email address I'll contact you and
design something for you. Just munge the address.

Biff
 
Try playing with excel with some real world data.

First, don't work directly off floppies--use your harddrive and backup to
floppies.

Second, backup, backup, backup. Screwing up is pretty much a matter of when,
not if.

Third, if you want to try something, save your current work first. Then if what
you tried doesn't pan out, just close without saving. (Yeah, there's an
Edit|undo that will save you sometimes, too.)

Fourth, start with something nice and simple.

Maybe your customer data base.

Think about what you want to keep track of first (maybe paper and pencil). Then
try to layout your data that way.

Try to put all your data for any one person on one row--makes things much
simpler later.

Try to put each piece of information into its own column. You'll find out much
later that it's a lot easier to combine fields than to separate them.

So I'd put "Miss Mary Jones" in three columns.
Salutation firstname lastname

(don't go too nuts--you don't need one column per letter!)

Same with address:

address1
address2
city
state
zip

would be 5 separate columns.

Once you have all your data entered, there's lots you could do using built in
features of excel (and office).

You can sort the data (if you only used one row per person) by any of your
columns.

You can apply a filter to just show you any value in any column
(data|filter|autofilter).

You can even create mass mailings by using Excel and Word together.

Save these links for later:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/mailmerg.htm
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MailMerge

The first is from David McRitchie and the second is by Beth Melton and Dave
Rado.

Remember: Backup, backup, backup.

When I have something important, my filenames look like:

Customerlist_2004_08_01.xls
customerlist_2004_08_03.xls
customerlist_2004_08_06.xls

When I know that I'll never have to go back to an old version, I'll blow it away
(in windows explorer).

(I'm gonna do that for stuff from 1989 real soon now!)

Good luck,
 
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