The Djeeni Best Practice

Djeeni is a set of building blocks. You have a lot of freedom in how you build your Djeeni process combining these blocks. Nevertheless, we have designed Djeeni having an optimal combination of MS Excel + Djeeni process steps in mind to achieve maximum efficiency with minimum effort. Please consider using the below tips.

Almost every report has fixed parts: labels, headings, (almost) constant values. You can set these values using Djeeni but investing in a one-time effort to create a template instead pays off. The corresponding Djeeni process is shorter and the maintenance cost of the template in MS Excel is lower than updating the Djeeni process.

MS Excel is strong in formatting so Djeeni leaves it to MS Excel. Make your target worksheets beautiful by formatting the templates that you create for them.

When a Djeeni process is working with many source worksheets, it is wise to create a naming convention using fixed length workbook name parts. For example: if your workbook names contain month names then use fixed 3 character length abbreviations instead of variable length month names in the workbook name. This approach comes handy at workbook lists.

MS Excel comes with regional settings and that includes different formatting of dates and numbers. Exchanging workbooks between organisations, systems and users leads to frequent problems with dates not understood by MS Excel as dates but literal text values making impossible to use these values in any process. Most of the time you can not do anything about it as the worksheet is not created by you. But if you can, try the below steps:

• Intermediary worksheets should (and sometimes final worksheets may) contain a date in three separate columns: year, month, date. Consider using dates in this structure. You can easily create real dates from these values (if needed) using the MS Excel function Date().
• Avoid using month names in source and intermediary worksheets. Keep month names only for target worksheets.
• If dates are entered manually by a small group of people, educate them to note that (incorrectly entered) dates as text values are left aligned within the cell while proper date values are right aligned. Correct these values during manual entry.