You want to grow your skills, but your manager doesn’t want to fund it. We hear that a lot. But what happens when you deliver your first on-time report—fully automated, with more detail than ever before?

Suddenly, you’re not just asking for support. You’re proving you deserve it. All you need is one good automation and the point will be made. Make a list of all the tasks that take significant amounts of time and rank them by the time taken.

Then look at each one and find the one that would be the easiest to implement. Set that as your goal then look at where the data is now. It may be that you will only have to move part of your Excel data, so that will reduce the work necessary to get the first project done.

In any case, the first challenge with migrating to Access is getting the data from Excel, but I have by-the-numbers videos on how to do that. You have to know a few things about Access to start, but I show you exactly what those are and what videos to watch.

You may have to do what I did. I was sick and tired of the corporate quote program (I was in sales at the time), so I spent time in the evenings learning how to create and automate my own system. Soon everyone wanted to use my quote system and the boss asked me to add to it.

I spent a few hours Monday to Thursday evenings for three weeks and it launched me into an entire new career! So this is an option and one that will pay back forever. The best thing about learning Access is that the knowledge is yours – no one can take it away from you.

If you want to visually SHOW your boss what can be done, play this DEMO. In the A2PUSA community I offer a course every month called “Dissect the Demo” that shows you how to do the things you see in the video.

The final option is to just hire me to create this first database, and I will keep it as small and inexpensive as possible. But SOMEHOW you need to get your first task automated. After that, the value will be obvious! Once your boss sees the results, their answer will change.

Impress first. Ask second.