I need advice on how to go about organizing my data base.
I am in the janitorial business. Over the years I have saved the thousands
of bids I have given businesses. All together I have about 8,000 excel files
which are anywhere from 3 to 5 pages long. What I want to do is take centain
pieces of info from these bids and put them all on one excel file. For
example, I'd like to take the company names, contacts, date, frequency of
service, and bid price from each individual file and then place them all on
one excel doc. Is there a way to do this whithout having to go into each file
manually to extract the desired info.

Any advice would be greatly appriciated

A macro can be written to automatically combine workbooks into a single
workbook but it depends on how consistant you were when you created the 8000
worksheets. For example, if you always put the Companies name in cell A1
then there is no problems. but if you put the company name in different
locations in each file then you have a problem.

"mr clean" wrote:

I need advice on how to go about organizing my data base.
I am in the janitorial business. Over the years I have saved the thousands
of bids I have given businesses. All together I have about 8,000 excel files
which are anywhere from 3 to 5 pages long. What I want to do is take centain
pieces of info from these bids and put them all on one excel file. For
example, I'd like to take the company names, contacts, date, frequency of
service, and bid price from each individual file and then place them all on
one excel doc. Is there a way to do this whithout having to go into each file
manually to extract the desired info.

Any advice would be greatly appriciated

In the process of helping clients manage their spreadsheets I have developed
a web application that loads, organizes and reports upon a portfolio of
spreadsheets.
This application is not yet being offered as a "product" or "service" but I
invite you to check it out at http://www.spreadsheetmanagement.com/
I may be able to help you extract the information you need.