Look familiar?

Has the following ever happened to you?

• You need to whip up a PowerPoint for clients that are either consistent with their branding or consistent with your own branding.
• Or you've found a mistake in some data and have fix your PowerPoint fast.
• Or you're forced to go through the pain of having to update a tracker each month.
• Or you do some sort of filtered or syndicated report?

I've personally experienced many, many late nights with all of these as I'm sure you have too.

 

What causes the pain

So what causes the pain?

 

Typical workflow researchers will know well

Let's take a look at the typical market research workflow.

• After you collect your data, you start the exploratory analysis: figuring things out, doing the layout, Setting up the PowerPoint.
• Then the data revisions arrive, or if you are doing a tracker, a new wave of data comes in, which requires PowerPoint to be revised; so you revise that, but the client asks for more revisions, like filters to be added or different cuts. So it's back to PowerPoint to update again.

 

Typical workflow researchers will know well: The Fun Bit

So there are two bits to the process. The fun stuff, where you add the most value and use your skills…

 

Typical workflow researchers will know well: The Grind

And the grind, where you get tripped up by endlessly revising, updating, fixing mistakes. It's here that you lose money, time, and business. And the grind steals all your time from the fun, skilled part.

 

Let's do a quick survey

Which of these is the fastest way to automatically create and update a presentation? What about the cheapest? What about with the fewest mistakes?
You get the gist. Obviously get computers and software to automatically do the updating is the fastest, cheapest, most accurate…

 

But, is it possible?

But it possible to automate away the grind?

 

Yes!

The answer is Yes. And I'm going to show you how.

 

Options for doing the Grind

There's a couple of options for churning through the grind.
Option 1 is the process we saw earlier. Option 2 is what I'm going to focus on today, but first, I'll breeze through option 3.

 

Look familiar? Branded reports

Let's take the first scenario here. I want to whip up a PowerPoint for clients that are either consistent with their branding or consistent with my own branding.

The fastest way to do this is to set your templates up in Displayr, rather than PowerPoint. So just like in PowerPoint, you can create documents that you use as templates for new studies. This means that you automatically get all the branding right from the get go.

 

In Displayr

Just like in PowerPoint, we have a document that we use as a template and copy it. Today, we'll be using a template we built for the fast food chain Burger Chef.

• Click three dots to the right of Template - Burger Chef
• Duplicate

As you can see, it's already set up like a PowerPoint slide, and I can format it accordingly.

• Insert > New Page > Title Only

We need some data!

• Upload data

Displayr is now automatically checking and organizing the data

• Title: Sample profile
• Click on Age and Gender (in Data Sets)
• Drag them both across

As you can see, the table's automatically branded correctly. We can chart the data easily as well. We'll make age a bar chart.

• Click on the age table
• Inputs > OUTPUT > Chart > Bar Chart

And we'll  make gender a pie chart

• Click on the gender table
• Inputs > OUTPUT > Chart > Pie Chart
• Clean up the layout

Let's turn off the stat testing for this client

• Appearance > Highlight Results > Options
• No
• Apply as Default

Now we'll export it all to PowerPoint

• Export > PowerPoint > Export
• Open PowerPoint

As you can see, in no time at all, we've quickly created a PowerPoint presentation that's on brand and if the data changes, we just report.

 

Look Familiar: Mistakes

Oh no! Now, we realize we forgot to add the weight. So we need to do everything weighted.

Done. As you can see we didn't need to redo any updating of the formatting or anything.

Of course, real world tracking studies are bigger - like this tracker here.

 

Look Familiar: Tracking

Now let's get rid of the grind of updating trackers.

We're going to automatically update this entire tracking report with revised data, ready to export to PowerPoint.

Looking at the top-right, it tell us the data finishes in September 2017.

The chart on the left shows us that Burger penetration is 83%. We can also see that it rose last quarter. This is clear from the chart and from the change number shown in brackets.

When I click on the data file it shows me that I have 4,386 cases.

Now, let's update this.

• Update data file

The Number of cases is now 4,853; remember it was 4,386.

The top of the page shows the data now goes through to December.

The penetration figure has changed. It was 83%, and it's now 78%. We can see the decrease in the chart as well.

Now we've updated this report and we can export it straight to PowerPoint and it will look exactly the same.

Pretty amazing. Now how much time would this save you?

In the next few solutions coming up, I'll show PowerPoint as the place with all the design.

 

Look Familiar: 100 reports.

Some projects require us to produce multiple versions of the same report template. I am now going to illustrate how to create lots of variations of one report instantly using automation.

 

In Displayr

Here's a one page infographic created in Displayr which shows the profile of people buying different flavors of nuts.

• Now we are going to export this as multiple reports, each filtered to a different sub-group, with the charts and numbers all updating automatically.
•  Export > PowerPoint > Advanced Options > Select multiple

I'll select four of these, but I can just as easily select all 41.

• Select:
  • Aioli
  • Asian Chicken
  • Bacon
  • Balsamic
• Export

Now this takes about 40 seconds, which is a long time in a webinar, so I won't export them for now. But imagine this was for different markets, products, or anything else. How many times have you had to create multiple reports cut for different filters? In this case, you'll get 4 perfect PowerPoint reports, no typos and no cutting and pasting errors, each cut for the market or brand.

 

Options for doing the grunt work
Most of you are already setup to do your formatting in PowerPoint. What I'm about to show you is how you can still do that, but still get all the benefits of using automation to update the data in the presentation that you've manually formatted.

 

Look Familiar

So, let's return to the earlier Burger Chef example in Displayr, where I made this really quick report that was in brand colors.

When I exported the charts, it was exporting images.

Because this has exported as an image, we can't format this in PowerPoint.

This is easily fixed.

As you can see, I am now setting this chart (and all other charts within this document) to export in an editable format:

• Go on the bar chart in Displayr
• Properties > POWERPOINT EXPORT > Format: Microsoft Chart
• Press Set as Default
• Click on Pie chart and show that has been updated to Microsoft chart

Now let's do that export one more time

• Export > PowerPoint > Export
• Open
• Enable Editing
• Click on the bar chart
• Right-click > Edit data

As you can see, it's now completely editable.

You can also see that my product concepts have all exported and are ready to go too.

Now for the grand finale.

 

Do it all in PowerPoint

Let's look at a tougher example and a more realistic one. Let's automate your typical PowerPoint report using your typical work flow, but without the grind.

Here we go.

The people who are good at analysis are likely to create something like this.

They 'rough-in" the analysis in Displayr -this was all done quickly by drag and drop. This is "The fun bit".

I'm guessing the first thing you want to do is to make everything editable in PowerPoint.

• Study Design > click on a chart > Properties > Point to POWERPOINT EXPORT.

Here I have the option to select how a chart is treated when exported to PowerPoint.

• Format setting Microsoft Chart.
• Set as default.

Age has also updated its PowerPoint Export setting.

Let's export it

• Export > PowerPoint > Create new document > Export all pages > Export

As you can see, it's not beautiful yet, but we can work on that. Most importantly the charts are now stored as editable Microsoft charts.

The good news is that there are lots of people out there who are great at making PowerPoint look great. . We sent this PowerPoint report to such a person and this is how they made it beautiful.

The PowerPoint report is currently saying Jul-Sep 2017. It also says 48% Male.

So there are lots of time saving possibilities here. For example, this design and formatting might be done before the data collection has even finished because as you've guessed, I'm about to update everything.

We can now use the automatic updating to update this report. Remember: the report is currently saying Jul-Sep 2017, with 48% Male.

I'm first going to update my Displayr document, with a new data set.

• Click on the data set > Update > My Computer > Displayr > Resources - Documents > Data > PowerPoint > Burger Brand Tracking Dec 2017

Note that the Males have changed from 48% to 51%, and the date is now showing Oct-Dec 2017.

Now for the PowerPoint update …

• Export > PowerPoint > Update existing document > Drag across Pretty Burger Brand Tracking Report.pptx. Select Export > Yes

When update log is on screen: You can see here a report is created that tells what has been updated - 7/7 charts have been updated, which is what we were expecting, and it goes on to tell us what has been changed.

We have an option to "Download Log" (which you might want to do to use as a checklist for a more complex project) or to "Close".

You can see the data of the report has updated. The "males" number has updated to 51%. And everything else has updated.

And here's the clincher - if you have a big old existing PowerPoint you can retrospectively hook it up to Displayr - imagine removing the grind on those old reports too. So just to repeat if you have an existing PowerPoint, you can get rid of the grind by retrospectively hooking that existing PowerPoint back to Displayr.

 

Say goodbye to "The Grind"

As you can see, Displayr has just pulverised the grind - anything you do, any data change, any mistake, any new wave of data, any change in weight, any change can be automatically updated in PowerPoint- getting rid of the grind and giving you so much time for the important stuff.

Automated reporting will reduce the time to create and update charts, tables … by up to 90%

If you have questions, please type them in.

If you're curious, go to displayr.com and book a demo. You will meet with a researcher like me and we will tailor that demo to your needs.

Simon has asked: Can I update text boxes?

Good question Simon - as long as the text is written in Displayr, or you have retrospectively linked that text box back to Displayr if you are using an existing PowerPoint, the answer is yes.