Windows IT professionals are, at heart, problem solvers who, in the course of their routine duties, might do extraordinary things to get the job done. Often, solving an IT problem—a server crash, a security exposure, or just trying to get users the data they need—is simply a matter of using a Windows application, system tool, or third-party product. But sometimes, solving a problem means trying a new technique or using a familiar tool or product in a new way. It means making the leap from simply being a skilled technician to being a true innovator.
Last spring, Windows IT Pro invited you to submit your most original and resourceful technicalsolutions to the first annual Windows IT Pro Innovators contest, co-sponsored by Microsoft. Out of 68 entries, Windows IT Pro judges selected three grand-prize winners and six honorable mentions in the small, medium-sized, and large business categories. The solutions represent a spectrum of Windows technologies: scripting and application development, Microsoft and third-party applications, freeware, and Windows OS features such as Group Policy. Our 2005 Innovators—your peers—show that Windows IT pros are a creative bunch. We hope their solutions will inspire you to pursue your own IT innovations!
GRAND PRIZE Small Business
David Soussan,
Chief Engineer, DAS Computer Consultants, Ltd.
Customize 400 PowerPoint Slides on the Fly
David Soussan is a computing jack-of-all-trades. His consulting business provides a full gamut of services—from network troubleshooting and hardware diagnosis to software design and systems integration. So when a client came to David and asked him to automate the tedious process of creating more than 400 individual Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, each containing dozens of unique graphs, he knew he could find an efficient way to do the job, although he didn't immediately see how to fulfill the client's request. "When a client needs something, I jump in and figure it out. I don't like the 'I can't do that' concept. Just because I don't know doesn't mean I can't figure it out," he says.
David's client, McGraw Wentworth, an employee-benefits brokerage consulting firm, conducts an annual Web survey of employers in southeastern Michigan to gather detailed data about the employee benefits they offer, such as medical and dental employee contributions, deductibles, copays, and data on short-and longterm disability plans. Participants answer more than 600 questions about their benefits packages. After the survey was closed, David split each survey from a single Microsoft SQL Server record into multiple Microsoft Access tables, then used both Microsoft Excel and Business Objects' Crystal Reports to crunch the data. The client wanted to use numerous graphs within PowerPoint slides tailored to each survey participant as a sales tool in seminars. Participants could see how their employee benefits stacked up against those provided by employers in the same region, in the same industry, of a similar size, and nationwide.
When David learned that the client would have to manually generate each PowerPoint presentation with more than 100 customized entries, then handassemble each presentation, he says he "just cringed" and thought, "I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I know there's a way."
To discover that way, David first researched in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. "I found an article that shows how to create a PowerPoint slide through a VBA application." (See "How to create a Graph object on a PowerPoint 97 for Windows slide in Access 97 by using Visual Basic for Applications" at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=177270.) "That [explained] some of the object structure of [Microsoft] Office. You can put a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft graph object or whatever inside Excel or inside another Word document or inside PowerPoint."
Using that knowledge, his Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming skill, and the Microsoft Office VBA Help files, David learned how to manipulate a graph object and the data it contained within a PowerPoint slide. When PowerPoint is run for a particular customer, David's VBA application opens the database record that contains the customer's survey data. When the customer selects a graph to display (e.g., median PPO-plan deductible for companies in the region), the application accesses a table that contains data corresponding to the x and y axes for that graph.
The client was thrilled with David's solution. "They loved it. Because these guys are healthcare consultants, they want help in marketing to [their customers]. And one of the ways they do that is by showing them, here's how you compare, and here are some things that we might suggest for you. So it's a marketing opportunity for the firm."
For David and his client, the clear benefit of his solution is the manual work it eliminates, which naturally translates into cost savings. "I built in about 20 hours something that saves thousands of manual hours and is reusable (the solution is fully table-driven), so that next year the client can change the template and reuse all the code," he says. "Being able to leverage technology to make the impossible possible is where IT creates 10-to-100-times improvements and where the real bang-for-the-buck is."
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