The work · demonstration build
Spreadsheet Rescue
The workbook only one person understands, rebuilt into a small app anyone can use — merged cells, broken formulas, the hidden tab and all.
Demo company is fictional; the workbook's problems are real ones, and you can download it to check. No client's real numbers on this site.
The challenge
Granite State Mechanical (a made-up 12-person outfit, standing in for a very real kind of shop) runs its jobs from one Excel workbook. Every Monday, someone copies last week's tab, pastes in the new numbers, and prays. Four years of that produced:
- A tab strip that tells the whole story by itself: Schedule · Jobs 2026 · Jobs 2026 (2) · Estimates · Contacts · OLD - DO NOT USE · Lookup · Sheet1 — and one hidden tab, Mike's copy, from a guy who left two years ago. Six jobs exist nowhere else.
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A cluster of
#REF!errors, all tracing back to the one week somebody deleted a column. - Merged header cells that look tidy and quietly break sorting.
- A "PO #" column added in March that every older formula silently ignores — including the totals row.
- Dates in three formats in the same column, courtesy of whoever typed fastest.
- A hardcoded "Total" row that doesn't match the sum of its own column. It's been wrong since spring.
The demo
The broken workbook on one side, the rebuilt app on the other, and a handle you drag to wipe between them — same jobs, same names, same dollars.
The demo also builds the broken workbook as a real .xlsx, in your browser — download it, open it in Excel, find the hidden tab, poke the broken formulas. It's a realistic sample, built to break the way real ones do. No client's real numbers on this site.
What the rebuild fixes
- Merged-header chaos → real columns that sort.
#REF!errors → totals that are computed, so they can't dangle.- The hidden tab → its orphaned jobs surfaced, reconciled, and badged as recovered.
- Date soup → one format, sortable.
- The mid-year "PO #" column → a first-class field on every job, in every total.
- The lying "Total" row → retired. Numbers come from the data now.
The question you're already asking
The old workbook depended on one person — Mike, and Mike left. Doesn't an app just trade one Mike for another? No: you own the code, the accounts, and a plain-English manual from day one, and it's boring, mainstream tech any developer can maintain. Here's exactly what you'd be holding — including a real example handover folder you can browse.
What it would cost
A rescue like this one — typically $2,500–$7,500, depending on how your data arrives (Excel/CSV exports, QuickBooks reports — we agree the format first). Rebuilding the broken nine-tab scheduling workbook in this demo would run about $4,500 and take three weeks. Your exact price is fixed in writing before work starts — and once it's in writing, it doesn't move.
How it's built
For the people who read this far on purpose: the demo is a static page that runs entirely in your browser. One dataset drives both halves — the "before" is a purpose-built grid component that reproduces Excel's grammar (tab strip, formula bar, merged cells, the works) from a description that includes the damage as data, and the "after" is a small job-tracking app over the same rows. The downloadable workbook is generated in your browser when you click, from that same description, so it always matches the demo — hidden tab actually hidden, broken formulas actually broken. The sample-data generator is part of the portfolio too: seeded, deterministic, and written to be read.
Working with something like this? Call or text me: [FILL: phone]