12 January 2018
If you are like most people, half of the time you spend making a report or presentation goes to low value tasks. Making the headings the right size. Setting chart colors to your company style. Copying and pasting the same table from Excel 17 times. Adjusting numbers in the text.
Thankfully there are tools that can help. For example, Upslide and Epsillion Publisher 2.
UpSlide is a Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint addin. It has some great features, like automatic linking of Excel charts and tables, automatic formatting in your company’s style, and making waterfall charts with just a click or two.
When should you use it? suppose you are working on a 20 slide PowerPoint presentation that is due this Friday. Each slide has either a table or a chart from Excel, and some text that talks about those tables and charts. As you work, you make changes to your date in Excel, then copy and paste the revised charts and tables into your PowerPoint presentation. At the same time, you are trying to use your corporate colors, use consistent font sizes, and update the numbers in the sentences that refer to the charts and tables.
UpSlide is perfect for this scenario. It costs $45 per month, with a minimum of five licenses, and for an extra fee can be customised to match your company’s style rules.
Epsillion Publisher 2 is a Word and Excel addin. It adds desktop publishing powers to your standard Microsoft Office installation. Kind of like Adobe InDesign, but a lot easier to use.
Picture yourself on Friday at 2pm. You are writing a document—perhaps about the local real estate market, an investment opportunity, or about the product you are advertising. Once finished, you want to publish it as a PDF, put it on your company’s blog, and send it as an email marketing campaign.
You’re sure you can finish the content for your document. But you will need to stay until 9pm to copy and paste the content into your blog and into your Mail Chimp email marketing platform. If you want to perfect the formatting of each element, you know you’ll be in the office until 10pm.
This is when you should use Epsillion Publisher 2. Write unformatted content in Microsoft Word, create unformatted tables and charts in Excel, and with a click or two you can let Epsillion Publisher take care of all of the formatting—in your company’s style—for the PDF, web, and email versions. Any time your data changes in Excel—including charts, tables, and numbers—a single click will update your PDF, web, and email versions.
Best of all, Epsillion Publisher 2 gives you brilliant typography. If you’ve always wanted your documents to look like they were professionally designed in Adobe InDesign, but don’t want the cost and delays that come with hiring a designer, Epsillion Publisher 2 is the perfect solution.
Finally, choose Epsillion Publisher if your company demands high security. All communication between your computers and our servers is encrypted using HTTPS.