Weekly and monthly reports are a necessary evil. In 2012 my assistant and I were spending 14 hours a week preparing reports with starting with six chapters each written by different authors in MS Word, tables produced from Excel workbooks and an SQL database, progress plots, site photographs, and other “standard exhibits”. The main bottleneck was wrangling all the MS Word text into a consistent format and building tables.
The switch to Asciidoc and a bit of Python immediately cut 8 hours from the work flow. After a few months, more python code was written to tweak the workflow cutting an addition three hours.
The reports produced by the new Asciidoc workflow were high quality and directly transformed into PDF and HTML. Moreover, it was possible to prepare two versions of the reports: internal use and client use.
Weekly and monthly reports are a necessary evil. In 2012 my assistant and I were spending 14 hours a week preparing reports with starting with six chapters each written by different authors in MS Word, tables produced from Excel workbooks and an SQL database, progress plots, site photographs, and other “standard exhibits”. The main bottleneck was wrangling all the MS Word text into a consistent format and building tables.
The switch to Asciidoc and a bit of Python immediately cut 8 hours from the work flow. After a few months, more python code was written to tweak the workflow cutting an addition three hours.
The reports produced by the new Asciidoc workflow were high quality and directly transformed into PDF and HTML. Moreover, it was possible to prepare two versions of the reports: internal use and client use.