Outlook: How to extract voting-button responses

[ShabanaHafiz]

In my organization, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 is being used for marking attendance.

Our administrative officer, at the end of day, creates a message, with the following options:
Voting Buttons: Present;E/L;S/L;C/L
Do not deliver before: Date of next day, 9:00 AM

E/L, S/L, C/L refer to Earned, Sick and Casual Leave respectively.

When an employee opens outlook on his PC, he gets an attendance marking message and sends the response Present using the voting button. If he is on leave, he responds to message of previous day by clicking E/L, S/L or C/L upon duty resumption.

Administrative officer prints each day report by going to the Sent Items and printing the Tracking tab information of the message of that day.

However, at the end of the month, he has to transfer this information to Excel using copy paste to get the attendance sheet of each employee.

Currently, voting-buttons responses are being extracted from messages manually; i.e., using copy paste to transfer the information into excel for each day. Can the process of making attendance sheet for each employee be made more elegant by using some other option?

 

[kjv1611]

Sure it can! It just depends upon how you want to do it, and how elegant, of course. And how much time you want to put into it.

My first thought is: Is your company sure this is the best way to manage such time? If it's larger than just a handful of people, maybe you should use a solution by ADP or some such company? That would be more accurate.

But for this solution, I have a couple of possible thoughts:

1. Using VBA, you could send the data out of Outlook to Excel using copy/paste commands in VBA or possibly through some sort of "TransferText" method or similar.

2. You might be able to connect to Outlook as a data source from within Excel in a template sheet, and somehow have it change (maybe via MS Query) the data being pulled according to what employee is being reviewed...

just a couple ideas..

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[ShabanaHafiz]

Thanks.

My company does not have large number of employees and is contented with this solution.

I am desirous to implement solution number 2 suggested by you; i.e., to connect to Outlook as a data source from within Excel in a template sheet. It is a good solution in our scenario.

I need your assistance and more elaboration as how to accomplish this.

 

[kjv1611]

Well, I should have said:
"I think you can connect to Outlook from within Excel". Yes, you can do it, but it's not as easy in Excel, apparently, as it is in Access.

But I did find this:

http://www.ozgrid.com/Services/excel-import-contacts.htm

Looks like a simple little tool to use to do what you need to do. Take a look at it.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me