From now to the end of the year, every day I will receive an email from Person A, containing a Microsoft Excel attachment. I open the attachment and do a Save As / PDF. Then I send both Excel and PDF to Person B.
Like I said, brainless. All I’m doing is the conversion from Excel to PDF, which a chimp could do.
Assume the obvious solution (why doesn’t person A just send the pdf straight to Person B) won’t work. Is there a way I can leverage Microsoft Outlook’s capabilities to take myself out of the loop?
I can’t imagine this being done without some coding.
Just thinking off the top of my head…
You could probably send all email from person A into a specific folder easily enough in Outlook.
Then write some VB to look in that folder, open the email, and move the attachment to a folder on your desktop and open that excel file.
If you have a PDF printer like Bullzip you could then have some VB to print that excel file as a PDF into the same folder as the Excel file, and then more VB to create an email to person B attaching all the files in your desktop folder.
I’m guessing you could eventually work it out but if it’s only for the rest of the year it might not be worth it.
I anxiously await responses from other dopers who know a lot more about this stuff to see their solutions…
If you can use Gmail with this, or add your email to Gmail, you can set up filters to automatically forward emails you get from Person A to a conversion service like this one, and then another filter to forward the email you get from the service to Person B.
I can probably be coded in VBA which I have no experience with. I’d be surprised if you can’t find a good start to the solution with good search engine work instead of coding from scratch.
If you’re a programmer this would be trivial. But there isn’t some point and click wizard that’ll get you very far.
Even assuming you’re not a programmer, there *are *some things you can easily do that’ll make your life easier …
IF you have Excel 2010 or later, it has a email-workbook-as-pdf feature which combines several of your steps.
IF person A is manually updating their xls each day with new info, rather than it being generated from scratch by some automated process you can make your life a bit easier by adding a macro to the xls which does the send-workbook-as-pdf and also sets the email addressee(s), etc. Do this once then send the macro-enabled xls back to person A who’ll then send it back to you each day with the new data and with the included macro.
IF the macro idea won’t work, at least you can configure your own Excel quick access toolbar to include the send-workbook-as-pdf button. This’ll at least reduce your clicks.
IF you can install a keyboard macro app on your PC, get something like autohotkey which will let you record all the keystrokes and play them back into both Outlook and Excel to automate the whole process down to one or two clicks.
IF you can do the macro-in-person-A’s-master-xls tactic, then MAYBE after a few days of that you can get them to press the macro button themselves instead of emailing the file to you so you can push the macro button.
Bottom line:
Never use technology to try to solve a social engineering problem. Do use technology to simplify a social engineering problem.