2007: Delivering the dashboard to customers

[ChrisChuffy]

Ok, I have a question about getting a spreadsheet to customers via email.

We have a snazzy new spreadsheet that we'd like to present to internal users as a dashboard. This is a static view once we produce it and we would like to avoid making the user open an attachment.

We have other reports that generate HTML bodies that we mail out, but we'd like to get away from that.

I've used copy/paste into an email, but that doesn't get some of the conditional formatting we'd like to use (the traffic lights, etc)

So, is there a way to embed a spreadsheet into an outlook email? I really appreciate any ideas you have!

Thanks!

PS: This is limited to Office 2007, so if 2010 has a perfect solution I can't use it.

 

[Norie]

So you just want them to 'see' the worksheet, not be able to interact with it?

Can't you just capture an image of it or the desktop?

By the way why not an HTML body, or attachment? Might even be a good idea to cut down on problems with people viewing what you've sent them?

PS You don't mention an email client, that might be relevant.

 

[ChrisChuffy]

So you just want them to 'see' the worksheet, not be able to interact with it?

Can't you just capture an image of it or the desktop?

By the way why not an HTML body, or attachment? Might even be a good idea to cut down on problems with people viewing what you've sent them?

PS You don't mention an email client, that might be relevant.

Exactly this is just a view of the spreadsheet.

Just capturing an image might work. I was hoping to make it something we could automate with a few lines of VBA. This will be just 1 more report we produce each morning and adding steps into a tight SLA makes it diffifcult.

I'm trying to avoid and HTML body since we want to include graphs, etc. and that would mean generating all those bits.

The attachment is really not deisrable since this is a project dashboard. We expect most users to get what they need in 20-30 seconds. Hvaing to open an attachment too kinda slows things down.

The mail client is Outlook 2007. This is an internal only dashboard, so we can at least be sure that everyone is using company standard software. And if they aren't it's their problem if there are viewing issues.

 

[Norie]

I'm pretty sure there is software out there that will do what you want but as far as I know there isn't an easy way to do it with VBA.

I've used Lotus in the past and you could add attachments in RTF format and display them in the email.

Sort of like a preview I suppose.

I don't know if that's an option in Office 2010, though I actually just tried the Save and Send option in Excel with the PDF option.

I thought that might work, but I didn't think it would take half an hour for Excel to 'publish' the worksheet so I gave up.

Maybe just my slow system, perhaps if it's done from Outlook it might be quicked.