Microsoft Office Solutions
Here's a little about Talon Computer Associates:
Talon's specialization is in Microsoft Excel. We customize and automate templates for
companies using Excel to make their week-to-week or month-to-month tasks easier. We do this by writing custom formulas, custom
formatting, VBA code or connecting to databases. Talon was incorporated in 1994
when we saw trends away from the one-man organization. Brad Gorsha and myself
are the partners along with a team of five professionals. We are a Microsoft
Certified Partner.
We have extensive experience using Excel as a window to data,
whether it exists in SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, Access or most other data stores.
Our clients have been pleased by the interactivity of the reports we created,
reports that can be ‘drilled into’ and shuffled around, giving the user new
insights into their data. We use standard, structured programming techniques
that are flexible to modify and easy to maintain.
Using Office as a development platform allows us to rapidly create
solutions for you in an interface the users are familiar with. This lowers
training cost and has the added benefit of giving the users an easy way to get
information for ad-hoc reports and presentations (i.e. Excel to PowerPoint),
without having to come back to the developers for program modifications. Our
projects work in both Office 2003 and 2007.
We are a strategic partner with Dechert-Hampe & Company. DHC
is a "Marketplace Management" consulting firm, unique in its ability
to offer an integrated set of sales, marketing and logistics solutions across
the full spectrum of the supply chain. The depth of DHC capabilities range from
strategic planning to implementation and execution - all focused on delivering
tangible results for consumer products and service marketers. This alliance
allows us to build on our 15 year Sales Forecasting experience that has
included two
Some of our projects are:
Sales Forecasting Tool using Excel as a
front-end to an Access database. An Administrator loads data files from the company’s
in-house system to our Access mdb. The data is then aggregated into an Excel
workbook consisting of customized pivot tables allowing the user to slice and
dice the data, even when disconnected from the network. This allows 'live'
reports to be taken to off-site meetings. This project was in partnership with
Dechert-Hampe & Company.
Access to Excel to PowerPoint. The user has PowerPoint
files that need to be updated each period. They want to distribute the
PowerPoint file without links. We wrote code that gets the data from Access
into an Excel template where the user formats the data ranges. Tags in the
PowerPoint file retrieve the correct data ranges or charts from Excel and paste
pictures into PowerPoint.
Field Rep Visit Scheduler. We created an Excel
template that's setup to calculate hours needed for various tasks that a field
sale rep has. As the rep schedules the tasks, a counter keeps a running total
so the by day or total period hours are not exceeded. When complete, VBA code
saves the tasks as appointments to Outlook.
In partnership with a demographic consultant, we created a system to
analyze historic sales activity and propose resetting of retail shelf
quantities for a major
We created a SQL Server
database to track incoming view data from cable companies around the country
for the purpose of calculating royalty payments. The front end and report are
through Excel.
For a nationwide
restaurant chain, we customized an Excel template to allow
individual departments to evaluate their employee's performance. Our code
creates individual files for each department that can be updated even when
disconnected from the network. At the end, our code combines them into a file
that can be loaded into the back end system.
We hope this gives you
some sense of what we develop. We have given many companies the tools to save
time and reduce errors by automating the repetitive parts their jobs when using
Excel or Office.