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When working for a bank I was asked to maintain an ongoing list of approximately 1,500 prospective M&A targets, I did so in excel. I stored basic information about the M&A targets (approx. revenue, # of employees, etc.) as well as CRM type information (last contacted, relationship owner,etc). I then created a two documents that could be generated based on a unique identifier I had created for each M&A target. The first document was a "one slider" on the prospect. A user could enter the unique identifier of a prospect and what was returned was something that looked like a one slide summary on the prospect created in PowerPoint. I formed the "one slider" by re-sizing all the cells on the spreadsheet to 2 by 2, for design flexibility, and using a combination of vlookups and hlookups to retrieve data. Similarly, the other document produced was a questionnaire that an executive could print out before a meeting with an M&A target so that he/she knew what information we already had on the target and what information we still needed.