The Problem:
Powerpoint is the typical medium used to present findings to non technical staff. Due to a rapidly changing environment refreshed analysis is required. This often involves have to refresh reports and can be a lengthy process to crop images and setup presentation. A potential work around for this is to offload the image generation to JMP and then link these images in a PowerPoint template. This eliminates the need to spend considerable resources.
The Data:
For this demo I retrieved data from data.gov.ie for Met Eireann weather data. This was chosen as it is IP friendly, open source and is something everyone is all too familiar with due to the ever changing climate in Ireland.
Links: https://www.met.ie/climate/available-data/historical-data & https://data.gov.ie/
Setup:
There is a zipped folder attached with contents needed to get started, extract it to your desktop and run the setup file, it will create the folder structure needed and start to download and parse the data needed, once downloaded and setup will open the UI for you to start creating images.
Once the images are generated can then link the Powerpoint presentation to the image locations as below, so that when you refresh or change the images they will be updated in the Powerpoint, this saves having to go regenerate slides and copy/paste pictures as the format you generated is saved as is the style of the images generated so that the report is consistent regardless of time frame analysed. This methodology can easily applied to any form of data.
One item that did generate a a lot of discussion was around using a global reference file and a file to store functions. I find this the most manageable way to work with complex data where I am often returning to some application I built in JSL. The globals file make it easy to transfer reports as all i need to do is update the file locations they are pointed at and all the code will work in the report. The functions file is something I keep updated as I have generated hundreds of code snippets form various analysis over the years. I make these as generic as possible so I reuse these again and again and this greatly cuts down on trying to solve things I fixed before. I would definitely encourage users to try something like that as it can be an invaluable resource later down the line.
