Situation: Change of Command Inventory.


Problem: It's all hands on deck getting equipment on the Commander's hand receipt lined up, in the hall way or out in the motor pool, in LIN order followed by NSN order along with all of it's BII. This is done in large part to minimize the time it takes for the Commander conducting the inventory to flip through the many printed out pages of his property book and find the item being inventoried. To save a few hours of his time, we spend a few days doing this work to prepare.


Solution: Wouldn't it be nice if we could just have that hand receipt on digits, scan a bar code, automagically search the document and highlight it? Well now you can! Introducing the Search And Highlight Excel (SAHE) xlsm document!


This excel spread sheet has VBA code in it. All you need to do is get your ULHR (or whatever list you intend to search) in an excel format. Open the SAHE document and then import the worksheets from the one you need to search into SAHE. You'll have to format what you'll be searching (which can be done with the click of a button) and, after that, you can search and highlight it!


There are 3 search actions that SAHE executes:

  1. Default search: Looks for an exact match for the value provided
  2. Multiple Values found search: If multiple values match what was searched for, you can click next till you get the appropriate match. There could be several very different items that may happen to have the same serial number. This search action allows you to choose the correct match
  3. Nothing Found search: If no exact match is found, you can shorten what you are looking for (say the last 4 of the serial number) and do a partial search. This is done because there are many times that what is encoded on a bar code or what is the device's actual serial number does not match what is on the property book (a switch with FOC12345YANK might be listed as F0C12345YANK)

While this probably isn't going to get you out of laying out BII, it will make the requirement of having everything in LIN and NSN order a little bit more unnecessary.


Get your copy here!

Do you need to print out some custom made bar codes? Check this out: