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Fact-lift: Putting a New Face on the Factbook

Fact-lift: Putting a New Face on the Factbook. Wednesday, 3/3/2010 2:00-2:50 Concurrent Session G Sabine. Mark Blankenship University of Texas at Austin. Why Change?. What are you going to improve? Information Design Presentation Format Process Tools. Tools. Cost Training

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Fact-lift: Putting a New Face on the Factbook

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  1. Fact-lift: Putting a New Face on the Factbook Wednesday, 3/3/2010 2:00-2:50 Concurrent Session GSabine Mark BlankenshipUniversity of Texas at Austin

  2. Why Change? • What are you going to improve? • Information • Design • Presentation Format • Process • Tools

  3. Tools • Cost • Training • Process Changes • The Unknown

  4. Information • Can you make information more useful? • Adding or removing information • More detail • Higher level summaries • Combing information from multiple sources

  5. Design • Can you present the same information in a better way? • Readability • Trends or Analysis • Charts and Graphs

  6. Process • Data Collection • Compilation • Formatting • Publication

  7. Presentation Format • Printed Book • PDF • Excel • Web site

  8. What We Started With • Run Mainframe printed reports to generate source data. • Maintain an Excel workbook for each report page in the handbook. • Shift data in each workbook to make room for the next years data. • Manually enter the data into each workbook. • Validate, Validate, Validate • Paste each worksheet page into a publication package. • Prepare for publication • Print, make web versions of each page

  9. What We Actually Did • Improved use of existing tools. • Reduced number of tools. • Improved standardization of reports. • Combined some reports. • Added charts

  10. Approach • Survey users • Evaluate current content for overlap/ usefulness • Evaluate new tools for generating reports and publishing • Printing • Online • How can we improve the process? • Decide how much to bite off. Clear Goals!

  11. Labor Intensive • How can we reduce the amount of time spent creating the handbook? • Documentation • Cross Training • Automation • Process • Tools

  12. Tools • Publish straight from MS Excel (and Word) • Eliminates need for additional step of copying and formatting. • Each page (table or chart) is pre-formatted for publication.

  13. Automation • Use pivot tables to pre-configure reports. • Pivot tables allow multiple views of the same data set. • Many reports driven from same source data. • Remove the need for manually entering data. • Reports are refreshed after new data sets are loaded. • Reduces validation time.

  14. Lots of Work Left to Do • Many data sets yet to be formalized. • Many existing reports can not be replicated with a pivot table. • Continual evaluation of new reporting tools with focus on automation, web presentation, and document publication

  15. Demo mark@austin.utexas.edu

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