Automated Reports

If you or your staff spend more than a few hours each month producing reports, then it might be worth automating the process with Microsoft® Office. If you spend hours and hours manipulating data in Microsoft Excel or Access™, and copying and pasting into other applications, such as Word, an automated report would be an ideal solution. Automating the process of creating a regular management report can really speed up production.

Producing regular Office reports manually can be tedious and time-consuming. Maybe you have to keep copying and pasting snippets of information and re-keying paragraphs of text. It can also be error-prone. An automated management report can gather your data together and present it in the format you want and it will only take a few seconds. Automating the process will reduce the potential for errors and you could also build in custom error checks to ensure only correct and meaningful data is used.

Reducing the time spent in creating a management report will leave you free to spend your time interpreting and analysing the data rather than collating it.

You may find it easier to store certain data in Excel but Excel does not produce good reports. The formatting options are limited and it is difficult to get the layout just right. Word provides much better formatting and layout options. Although you can link or embed spreadsheet data in a Word document, linking and embedding tables and graphs can have unreliable results. The data often does not fit on the page, the formatting is wrong, the labels in the graphs seem to have a mind of their own and are often resized to be virtually unreadable.

An automated report can copy the data from Excel to Word in the format you wish. Graphs can be copied over with their labels intact. All you need to do is press a button and the automated report will gather the data from your Excel spreadsheets, create graphs and present them in the Word report.

You may also want to display your Excel tables and graphs in a PowerPoint presentation. You can also link or embed Excel data and graphs in PowerPoint but again, the results are unreliable.An automated report can copy the data from Excel to PowerPoint in the format you want and ensure that tables and graphs fit nicely on a slide and also follow the correct colour scheme. The results will be much more reliable and you can be confident that copying and pasting and re-keying errors have been eliminated.

An automated report will save you loads of time. All you need to do is press a button and the data is transferred from Excel to PowerPoint in seconds.

Automated reports take advantage of Microsoft's integrated development language Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA). Microsoft Office applications, such as Excel, PowerPoint and Word, can access and control other Microsoft Office programs entirely through VBA code. As reports using Microsoft Office support multi-application procedures, you could store your data in Access, export it to Excel for analysis, add it to an article in Word, email it to interested parties using Outlook® and publish it to a website - all at the press of a button!; VBA programming makes it all possible.

More information

Instructions

Full instructions with information about how to use the templates as well as how to install them will be provided.

Installation and rollout

We can provide an installation program if required making it easy for non-technical people to install our templates.

Training

Our templates are easy to use but if you want some help to get you started, we are happy to provide on-site training for you or your users on how to use of the template.

Support

We provide three months free email and telephone support (to a central contact) on a template that we develop for you. We would be happy to enter into a support contract to cover longer periods.