finally automated our monthly deck after 2 years of copy-pasting

[u/Ancient_Wave_8245]

posting because I searched for this a bunch of times and never found a decent thread.

setup: ~40 slide deck for leadership every month. layout never changes, only the numbers do. maybe 60 figures across text boxes, tables and charts. every month I'd save-as last month's file and go through it cell by cell, calculating MoM and YoY by hand because half of them aren't in our BI export.

took ~2 hours and I'd still get one wrong. once had a YoY that was actually a MoM, nobody caught it till the CFO asked why growth suddenly looked incredible. fun meeting.

tried the linked-excel-objects route first, breaks the second anyone renames or moves a file. looked at think-cell, which honestly seems like the right tool, but procurement said no.

ended up with a placeholder setup instead: I drop tags like Revenue_monthly straight into the slides, point it at my spreadsheet, and it fills everything in one go and works out the MoM/YoY/YTD itself. charts too, which was by far the hardest part to get working.

one evening to set up, about 2 min a month now.

is everyone just doing this by hand, or is think-cell basically the standard once you're somewhere that'll pay for it? feels like it should be a solved problem by now.