Re: QUESTION: Reference Excel Files

[Bill Burns <BillDB -at- ILE -dot- COM>]

Sharon writes:

> We currently produce multiple documents for our corporate directors
> that
> consists of 400 Excel charts.  My manager has decided she wants a Help
> file
> developed (using RoboHelp) that would reference all these charts as
> bitmaps.
>  We are currently resampling  them to make them smaller using Paint
> Shop
> Pro.  What a hassle!  These puppies change every month.
>
> Is there a way to reference these Excel charts without converting them
> to
> bitmaps?  Are we totally insane to even consider doing all this work
> every
> month.  Is there an obviously simpler way we have totally ignored?
>
Yikes. I'd say it's insane.

The question I have is with the tool choice. Windows help is not the
sort of tool I'd want to use for a rapidly changing body of documents
since each revision would include compilation and validation as well.
This isn't the sort of undertaking I'd want to involve myself with
unless we could automate a good part of the process.

Is there any reason you can't use HTML? If you're using Excel '97 you
could convert the charts to HTML, maybe develop some scripts to do this
automatically for you in a batch. The possibilities are limited here by
the web development resources you have. If you don't have an intranet,
you could still put together a network-based online document system
using OLE embedding and linking, or even just launch the individual
spreadsheets using an ExecFile macro from a help window (provided that
you always use the same filenames for the charts). Either way,
converting 400 spreadsheets every month and maintaining the links would
be a helluva waste of resources.

Good luck.

Bill Burns
Senior Technical Writer
ILE Communications Group
billdb -at- ile -dot- com