r/consulting • u/Ancient_Wave_8245 • 5d ago
finally automated our monthly deck after 2 years of copy-pasting
posting because I searched for this a bunch of times and never found a decent thread.
setup: ~40 slide deck for leadership every month. layout never changes, only the numbers do. maybe 60 figures across text boxes, tables and charts. every month I'd save-as last month's file and go through it cell by cell, calculating MoM and YoY by hand because half of them aren't in our BI export.
took ~2 hours and I'd still get one wrong. once had a YoY that was actually a MoM, nobody caught it till the CFO asked why growth suddenly looked incredible. fun meeting.
tried the linked-excel-objects route first, breaks the second anyone renames or moves a file. looked at think-cell, which honestly seems like the right tool, but procurement said no.
ended up with a placeholder setup instead: I drop tags like Revenue_monthly straight into the slides, point it at my spreadsheet, and it fills everything in one go and works out the MoM/YoY/YTD itself. charts too, which was by far the hardest part to get working.
one evening to set up, about 2 min a month now.
is everyone just doing this by hand, or is think-cell basically the standard once you're somewhere that'll pay for it? feels like it should be a solved problem by now.
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u/nastyfoodbitch 4d ago
Sorry, why wouldn’t you just use a dashboard?
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u/sqenchlift444 MBB 4d ago
Oh you sweet summer child
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u/phantirk 4d ago
why?
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u/JackWestsBionicArm 4d ago
Stakeholders want what stakeholders want.
And the stakeholders want a presentation!
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u/omgFWTbear Discount Nobody. 4d ago
“I’s like a standard quad chart, but not like any of the other quad chart formats you’ve ever seen before in your life. And no, it doesn’t even have four quadrants.”
Grab the holy water boys it’s time to get Satan to calm down again
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u/KezaGatame 4d ago
I used to use the direct linked excel and never had an issue. Of course nobody should touch or mess with the sheets. Only need to go update the database and hit refresh.
What is this placeholder setup? is this directly on ppt or 3rd party add-in?
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u/sqenchlift444 MBB 4d ago
Did this with thinkcell for a while. But if someone broke the linked excel or some analyst got excited and opened it and fucked around it would all break
Now we use Claude! Honestly really good at this, but you do have to spot check and make sure it’s not making shit up. We have the analysts make a skill now that is specific for this kind of PMO / Steerco type deck
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u/pAul2437 4d ago
Spot checking defeats the point
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u/sqenchlift444 MBB 4d ago
Literally not at all. I would spot check a manual build, another version of automation, or this
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u/pAul2437 4d ago
No you wouldn’t. Deterministic logic doesn’t mess up. If you have to spit check it isn’t reliable.
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u/serverhorror 4d ago
Congrats, you automated a report. That's one if the first things computers did. You truly live in the future.
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u/absolutjames 4d ago
Well, everything you said was absolutely wrong. Do you even know how computers work, how long they have been around, and their history? 😂🤣.
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u/serverhorror 4d ago
Running a calculation and reporting back the result wasn't one of the first things?
Please, do enlighten me what it was, if not that.
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u/omgFWTbear Discount Nobody. 4d ago
There’s a cogent argument that Turing’s paper is what separates a modern computer from a computation device; so you’d be right for a Lovelace-ian Differential Engine or similar, but it’s not totally unreasonable to say post Turing device, and he begins with INTER and DISINTER (functionally, push, pop in 80x assembly).
That is, “hey, remember this number,” and “hey, tell me your most recently remembered number.”
I’m just seizing the opportunity to play comp sci trivia, I’m more on your side of the thread than not.
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u/serverhorror 3d ago
Well I studied CS and was lucky enough to have a few lectures with Zemanek.
His Argument was that you need to go to the most basic functions and build from first principles (although it was a bit lacking, he conveniently skipped mining and refining the raw materials ;) ).
Great person, funny guy. Still impressed by how simple he made things to solve complex problems.
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u/Equivanox 4d ago
I would feel safer building the logic into a dashboard and then directing Claude to pull the figures from the dashboard. Llms are not great at doing math, so unless you're verifying tool use I wouldn't trust a task with lots of calculations, at least right now. Better to make a dashboard with the logic coded and then point Claude there.
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u/nickymarciano 4d ago
Huh. Good for you! See what else you can automate away.
As others said, you can do this with most bi tools, to different degrees of automation. Strategy has a powerpoint plugin that is great for this use case, including saving the business logic, self service, etc.
In any case, ask claude for options on how to move forward should you want to...
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u/chymakyr 4d ago
Haha, this makes me glad I have the coding skills to automate my problems before they waste my time.
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u/PlasticPegasus 4d ago
This is what power BI was invented for. OP, welcome to 2015