Statit piMD allows you to automate your monthly/quarterly
reports by allowing you to publish output to
MSOffice applications. And by using capabilities
built into MSWord and PowerPoint, you can save
yourself the time and effort required to hand
insert each of your indicator graphs into the
Office Document each reporting period. The key
here is to build up your report framework and
then link in your indicator graphs, rather
than embed them into your document. Let's
walk through the steps to perform this in PowerPoint
and view an example page.
Step 1) Create your presentation (or use
your existing framework) using PowerPoint.
Determine your key points, slides and how you
will organize your presentation. Determine the
layout of your output, but there's no need to
insert any graphs yet. You will be doing that
in step 3 below. Here is the layout of the slide
we will focus on in this example:
Step 2) Use Statit piMD to publish the indicator
output to be included in your report.
Use Statit piMD's built-in publishing capability
to save the graphs for the desired indicators.
For this example, we plan to put four AMI indicators
onto one page, so we will save each of the indicator
outputs as a medium-sized image. (Statit piMD
gives you lots of control over the size and
appearance of these images.) We will publish
the output to a specific directory so that we
can reference the images from our PowerPoint
presentation.
Step 3) Include references to the published
image in your PowerPoint document.
Now that the images have been saved to a folder,
we can include them in our presentation. This
is where we want to be sure to link to the images,
rather than just insert (and embed) them. Wherever
you need an image, select Insert -> Picture
From File within PowerPoint and select the desired
indicator image. Be sure to select Link to
File from the Insert menu (see image below).
Step 4) Add hyperlinks to allow users the
ability to interactively view detailed output.
This step is optional and it will allow you
and other users to show detailed output (including
Comments/Action plans). It will also allow you
to drill into the output to reveal details.
This can be extremely useful if you are giving
this presentation interactively. When a question
comes up which requires more detail, you can
just click on the Indicator Output to bring
up the detailed output from Statit piMD.
To add a link to Statit piMD to view the details,
right click on the image and select Insert Hyperlink.
Here is an example of adding a link for the
AMI 2 indicator:
Step 5) Test links and review output.
After completing the above steps, here is what
you will have. Users can now mouse over the
images to view the tip and when they click on
the images, the detailed output comes up. All
four of the images below are live, but you should
try it out on AMI 4 which has
an assessment and action plan that the expert
had entered.
Step 6) Updating the presentation for the
next reporting period.
This is the easy part. Each reporting period,
you will need to update and change any specific
content in your presentation. To update the
indicator output, simply perform step 2 and
open up your presentation. It should now have
the most current images included in your presentation.
Conclusion
Utilizing this approach will reduce the time
and effort to create and maintain your Monthly/Quarterly
reports using MSWord or PowerPoint. While this
example focused on PowerPoint, the same concept
works for MSWord.
You can view more examples of publishing to
Word or PowerPoint by going to http://pimd.statit.com
and viewing the Additional Examples.
