Our customer (a large Market Research agency) wanted to reduce the amount of time its research teams were spending creating and manipulating the graphics and charts used in their presentations. They had a library of charts that they liked to use for visualising data. These charts had a number of unique characteristics which made them time consuming to create and introduced the risk of errors appearing in some of their most important client deliverables. Furthermore the presentations are being created by research consultants whose focus is providing insight to their clients.

After investigating what was available on the market to help with this, they found that the available solutions were either very complicated to operate requiring dedicated support staff just to perform this task, or too simplistic and unable to produce the kinds of charts and graphics they required without large amounts of manual touching up.

We produced a system which is tightly integrated with the Microsoft PowerPoint environment where the researcher can just pick the results they wanted to chart and then pick the type of charts they wanted to use from the library of favourite charts. This allows their researchers to create presentations very quickly without impacting their ability to customise the presentations within PowerPoint at all. Furthermore they can update and refresh their presentations whenever they need to with new data.

Aspects of this solution and what we learned have become central to all solutions we use for data visualisation.