I recently came across this tool, dox42, that I think is pretty cool and can help teams and organizations reduce/eliminate some of the administrative tasks and produce information from the source systems not only correctly, efficiently and in a consistent way but also automatically.

Some of the benefits for using this (or similar tools) can be:

• Dox42 allows business users to create complex, detailed document templates via the tools that they already use such as MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• The tools allows integration from different source systems; such as MS Teams, SharePoint, CRM systems, MS Excel, Access or SQL databases
• The tool allows the templates to be centralized. They can be updated (adding/removing fields, changing company logo etc) very quickly and easily (versus telling everyone to update their templates individually)
• The templates allow users to generate documents (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) with a click (regardless of how many slides or pages)
• It prevents incorrect data to be shared. Since the data would be coming directly from the source systems, no manual updates to the documents needed
• It eliminates copy & paste errors, misalignment or inconsistent formatting throughout the documents
• It can include complex calculations or graphs that could be automatically updated, thus, eliminates incorrect data

Dox42 can integrate with a lot of technologies, not just MS products (as shown below).

I explored and tried generating PowerPoint slides for my projects. You can see the dox42 template I created below. This template brings data from an existing project management SharePoint site and a SQL database. The PowerPoint slides are generated automatically per project, so it doesn’t matter if it’s 1 project or 100. Since this is a template, once the data points or labels or format is changed in the template, it would be automatically changed in all slides generated. Once the slides were generated, they can still be updated manually with further data/comments too, if needed.

Here is the screenshot of one of the PowerPoint slides that was generated automatically for a sample project. As we discussed above, all fields are coming directly from SharePoint Project Tracking or SQL database. Budget Chart calculations are done in a temp Excel and then brought into the PowerPoint. The data/images are displayed dynamically (i.e. indicator colors, project manager’s picture, etc).

Below short video shows how easy and quick to create documents directly in SharePoint, from an end user point of view.