[thelist] Best Practice? (from DB --> Presentation)

[Luther, Ron]

Hi Folks,


I've got a user who runs quite a few of my nice reports for pulling
information out of the database.

They dump that information into Excel, (run 10's of thousands of lines of
Excel macros [yes-really] that I've inherited maintenance for -- yuck!),
make charts, import into Powerpoint and set the 90+ page presentation out on
the intranet after hand delivering print copies to numerous execs.

All of which takes an astounding amount of expensive (and boring) manual
effort and intervention.


I'd like to automate the whole dang thing and eliminate the manual effort.
[I'd also like to eliminate the &^%&^* 'unstable' Excel macros that keep
breaking.]


Got any suggestions for techniques or technologies?  I think they might be
persuaded to live with a PDF file instead of a Powerpoint presentation file.
Technology/platform is fairly irrelevant - I don't care if I have to learn
something new.

What would you do?  [Basically - I'm hoping someone will come back and say;
"look into {module_X or custom_tag_Y} - you feed your recordset in through
ASP/CF/PHP/CNN/IVs/??? and it lets you create nice business charts and
summary tables in a familiar format.]

{Or maybe this is an application where something like Lotus Notes would be
"best"?}


Thanks,

RonL.