Monday, August 09, 2010

Recent Projects I’ve done



Microsoft Excel 2007 Chart and Table formatting for large professional services firm.
We had previously done an Excel Chart Formatting Add-in last year as part of a project to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007. The client wanted to include nicely formatted tables as well as charts from Microsoft Excel into their Word Documents and PowerPoint Presentations.
As a result of their requirements, we made a customized ribbon which allowed the users select a chart or range of cells and click on the format button. After clicking on the format button a form popped up allowing them to select a standard size. They could also tick to output the result as an image for pasting straight into Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint. These images could be resized inside Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint without the fonts or other components losing their fidelity. We also helped them roll out a custom Microsoft Office Theme which was used to set the colours and the font used.

 
Automated daily Microsoft Excel Branch Reporting to a SharePoint Extranet.
The problem the client had was generating and emailing daily reports in Excel to each branch one by one. They wanted to automate the saving of these Excel Reports into SharePoint daily.

Initially SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 was looked at, but it didn't output the worksheet names nicely. We ended up using Microsoft Sql Server Integration Services to do the Microsoft Excel automation. There were a few tricks to make the pivot tables work nicely and now a Microsoft Excel report is saved each morning for each branch into their specific document library. The SharePoint Extranet was created from a script generated by our special Excel SharePoint Extranet creator Application. This makes it easy to set up SharePoint Groups that are easy to maintain.


 

Excel Application for generating monthly branch reports to large SharePoint Extranet.
The client previously had a mess of workbooks all linked for each branch for the last 3 years. Maintenance of these workbooks was a nightmare and updating them was extremely time consuming. A Microsoft Excel application was used to setup the scripts to create SharePoint Sites for over a hundred branches. This made creating the SharePoint groups and Sites just a matter of filling in the Excel Worksheet. Then a Microsoft Excel Application was created for generating monthly Excel reports and saving them to each branch's SharePoint document library. The end result allowed a user to click a button in Excel once a month after downloading the latest extract.

 

Major upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007
We upgraded Hundreds of Microsoft Word Templates and Microsoft Excel Macros from Microsoft Office 2000 to 2007 for large engineering company. To do this efficiently we used a Microsoft Excel application to find all the common functions, forms and toolbar buttons in the existing Microsoft Word Templates. After analysing the results, the solution involved moving most of the code, toolbars and forms from the Microsoft Word Templates to one main Microsoft Word Add-in. It is now much easier to maintain and update any of the Microsoft Word Templates.


 

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