Look your best with little effort - Excel, Project VBA for Page Formatting
It's been a while since I've posted some code to my site, so I thought I'd pop up a few more nuggets.
For the first one, I was reminded of the functionality of good-looking printouts at a recent meeting. A high-pressure project, lots of analytics design, review, code, and test in a rather condensed period of time. We walked into a status update session, and the lead analyst handed out four sheets of paper that had a bunch of interesting looking numbers on them. He was making a fairly important point, but the pages were difficult to read and understand - four versions of the same thing, just minor differences. We burned at least 10 minutes just getting to a common understanding of what he was presenting.
Admittedly, it is tedious work to nice up the page, with minimal obvious payback. However, as a Tufte fan, I know that a group can get to a common understanding of your point when they can focus on the message without struggling through the presentation. Besides, the steps are pretty straightforward, so you can macro it quickly.
Now, with every chunk of paper you output, you can exude this air of professionalism, yada yada ...
The next two just follow the same theme, but this time with MS Project printouts. There is some method to my madness here - the page size is 11x17, and it works best when you print double-sided. Then, the plan folds to standard paper size - easy to include in a stack when you file it or take it to a meeting. Heck, the folded plan even serves as a little folder for my other project documents / notes.
The final bit for today is just another version of my Custom Menus code - this time for MS Project. Note that I could pretty much use the MS Excel version without change, but for some reason I am unable to show FaceIDs in MS Project.
Labels: presentations
posted by James P. MacLennan at 1:34 PM
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