What's the best way to do automate a narrative financial summary?

[stuboyle]

I'm trying to automate a monthly narrative financial summary where I can automatically refresh the information. The summary has some standard boilerplate information and some information unique to a specific month. Currently, I'm typing it by hand into Word and copying it over to Powerpoint where it becomes part of monthly board packet. Here is an example:

> Net income for December of $235mm was $9mm favorable to plan compared on a budget of $224mm. The primary drivers were:

- Salary expenses was above plan due to unplanned overtime
- The Western division was goofing off . . .
- Etc . . .

Now this will go into great detail for about 3 pages. After month-end, I have to prepare this before the numbers are final and then refresh it multiple times as the numbers are updated. The most flexible tool for do this is Word, since I has the flexibility to
add additional text easily and to get the bullet point format correct. However, Word is laborious in that I have to manually update and verify the information. I tried to do this in Excel but I couldn't get the bullet point formatting to look right.

Note that financial info comes from Excel and I can create logic for things like favorable/unfavorable.

It seems as though it is like one big Mail Merge with only one merge with many attributes for one document.

What would be the best approach to handle this?



Thanks - Stuart

 

[stuboyle]

A co-worker of mine figured-it-out.

If I copy in Excel then into Word using Paste Special, Paste Link, then select "Unformatted Unicode Text" and then finally change the font in Word, that should do what I want it to.