Data drives decisions. Real-time data is critical to tracking and adjusting your work, and motivating the stakeholders who affect your operations, efficiencies, and goals. So why leave data out of your digital signage strategy? Instead, show Excel and XML messages on screens to keep everyone up to date.
You can show live data using Excel and XML to feed your digital signs. This is a great way to leverage information you’re already collecting in a format you’re familiar with. Anything you can put into a table can be put into your playlist. Here are just a few possibilities:
- Progress to goals
- Department figures
- Athletics statistics
- Manufacturing progress
- Shift assignments
- Sales and call center stats
- Directory information
- Training completions
- Services provided to date
- Hospital bed availability
- Appointments and wait times
- Menu boards
The beauty of an Excel or XML message is that, once it’s formatted, you just have to change the data in one place – your Excel or XML file – and it will automatically update on your screens. This saves you time, money and resources instead of creating digital signage messages from scratch each time a figure changes. And, because your digital signage system is distributed, a change in one spreadsheet or XML file can populate various message formats on a single display, groups of screens or your whole network quickly and easily.
Some content management systems make you cut and paste or show a screenshot of your worksheet. Our software lets you directly import the data, and gives you control over how it displays. After you select the data source, you can configure the following:
- Column and row headers
- Select formats for each column (general text, number, percentage, currency, date, time)
- Font color, style, and size
- Row height, column width
- Background folder, background and audio
- Refetch time in minutes or hours
Once you get your formatting set up, you simply schedule it like any other message. Voila! You’ve now got real-time data for digital signage.