At that time, details of all bookings of children against pre-school sessions were held in two master Excel workbooks (one for each pre-school) organised much in the way of a year-planner.

To prepare the class registers for each week, children's names and sessions of attendance for the upcoming week were cut and pasted into new sheets, where they were manipulated in various ways before manually copying them into Word document templates containing (for example) mandatory risk registers, prior to printing.

Manual checks had to be made to ensure that required adult/child ratios remained within prescribed childcare regulations (which are dependent on each child's age). The process was repetitive and time-consuming to perform.

I developed a straightforward extension of these master workbooks, whereby the bookings for any given week could be selected via a pick-list, brought forward into a current-week view and enriched using formulae to automatically calculate each child's age on the day, and thereby the minimum staff requirements.

We dispensed with the Word document and prepared 5 new worksheet tabs (one per day) which auto-populated with the details of the children attending each morning and afternoon session for the selected week. Preparing the registers was then simply a matter of selecting the week, checking the required staff cover, and printing off the relevant sheets.

This was all achieved with standard Excel functionality, but it later proved appropriate to add some buttons to automate the insertion of new rows, etc to reduce the possibility of manual errors when cut and pasting formulae.

These simple workbook changes considerably reduced the time required to prepare class registers each week and doubtless led to reduced manual errors.