Excel in Trialdirector

Question: How do you use an excel spreadsheet as a trial exhibit on Trial Director? Can you scroll up & down with an excel spreadsheet? We have lots of trials where excel spreadsheets are trial exhibits.

Answers:

You can present an Excel spreadsheet in Trialdirector by converting the spreadsheet into a PDF file so that you can use the zoom features in the Presentation mode to show relevant sections of the rows and columns of numbers. I like the answer given to this type of question at:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/presenting-excel-spreadsheet-your-jury-michael-kelleher/

Michael indicates the methods I would use in presenting Excel data through Trialdirector but also suggests converting data into graphs that also then can be used to present the information in Trialdirector.

If you click on the above image you can see here a spreadsheet converted to PDF that is using the zoom call out tool in Trialdirector.

You can display an Excel spreadsheet in Native mode in Presentation view but depending on the version of TrialDirector you have, you might need to save it as an older version of Excel rather than the latest edition of Excel. This could result in a problem with pivot tables if you have used these.

The person who asked this question also made a suggestion - that rather than reading over the instructions provided in a PDF file as to use of the mark up tools and annotation tools I would demonstrate these in Trialdirector itself. This is actually something I will be doing in one of our sessions yet to come. The reason I went over the instructions in the PDF file is because there are some important caveats mentioned there that I wanted to explain in this documentation. But I agree the demonstration of these annotation tools is important and will be done in our session 7 and 8.