We pride ourselves on offering truly unique solutions at Blue Juice… it’s one of our values after all!
Our client came to us with a dilemma. Each month they had to produce a lengthy report which was created in Excel. They wanted to present the report in a way that looked engaging and therefore as ‘un-Excel’ as possible. They thought a PDF template would do the trick.
We considered the alternatives, factoring in the time and effort that would be required for the team to populate another template using content from the source Excel file each month to produce a great looking report.
The solution: keep it in Excel! Through research, clever settings (all credit to Excel) and a dose of good design, we turned a drab Excel into something quite spectacular.
Complete with a title page, contents page and chart pages which can be duplicated, it’s not only easy on the eye, it has great functionality too. Charts can pull data from other data sources (linked files) or they can be updated in the template and worksheets locked so they can’t be edited by your target audience. To achieve a far less ‘Excel’ look we hid the X and Y axes too.
This was a unique solution created for a specific team with their data – check out a ‘shell’ version so you can see the overall effect below:
