Miscellaneous Sample projects
Client Request: "Tag Cloud"
Situation: A client intended to present keywords found in the answers of open-ended questions as tag clouds.
Solution: Apparently, tag clouds are being used to indicate the frequency of certain keywords in a text by font size and / or color. The simple solution - feeding a list of keywords into a macro and let it count the occurrences in the text - turned out not to be feasible. There were too many "versions" of any keyword in the answers typed by the respondents. No way getting around separating the keywords from the chaff and correcting the spelling manually.
The rest - automated counting and aligning the tags' frequencies with predefined HTML text formats - turned out to be easier than expected. Two hours later the customer had the first layout draft on his table, or rather in his inbox.
Client Request: "Chart'n Text"
Situation: A client had to present her section's work on the occasion of a yearly congress. Work on the text's content was finished, the latest data were included in spreadsheets, but other appointments kept her from continuing to work on her report. No time to consider her presentation, and the scheduled print date was about to expire.
Solution: The text betrayed considerable haste, and needed extensive rework. The data documenting her work with clients needed reorganization in order to create charts. A layout professional took care of the print layout based on the reworked text and my charts. Meanwhile I designed the presentation using the colors of the organization's logo, comprising all of the charts and a few selected photographs and a greatly condensed version of the report as explanatory text.
