Email Reporting Templates

mzx380

Hey everyone
I was wondering if anyone here has any resource for creating dynamic emails. I will need to start sending reports via email to people soon and would like to avoid using attachments. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to create a solid presentation of information after an email is opened in outlook?

Willing to listen to other suggestions as well
Thanks

TheFORCE

Why don't you want to do attachments? What type of reports will you be doing? Are these reports generated natively from a system or will you be using data from different systems and create your own reports?
I beleive Word and Excel have an email function where you can send multiple emails as templates but with different attachments for each.

IronmanX

Python, HTML, CSS maybe some JavaScript.

First google result looks promising.
Building Dynamic HTML Email Content with Python - Stack Overflow

You could swap out Python for many other languages. Python seems a popular choice on this forum due to the amount of people interested in cyber security. I currently use a CMS that achieves this using html, css and wrapping the dynamic content in tildes

***Maybe avoid using css and JavaScript if your sending these reports to people who may filter out external content for security reasons.

GSXR750K2

I ditto TheFORCE's questions. Is this report going to use the same source of information every time, or will it need to be tailored?

Depending on your environment and where the data is coming from, PowerShell can be used to create HTML emails, and if your data is coming from an Excel sheet already then it can read it to create the content of the email. I use it for relatively simple report automation.

If it's an option for you, and you're interested, here's an article where a guy built a daily systems report in PowerShell with tables and pie charts, then passed it into HTML/CSS for emailing...

https://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/powershell/building-a-daily-systems-report-email-with-powershell/

mzx380

Thank you TheForce, Ironmanx and GSXR750K2

All of your suggestions are even more than what I need but I will definitely bank them for the future.

What I am looking for was a more professional means of sending status updates within my emails on some complex projects in which I am the PM. The data will be statically entered and not from pulled from a source (at least for now). I wanted this report to look nice because it will reach places pretty high up and from personal experience I know that attachments will not be read.

Thanks again for your suggestions and please let me know if you or anyone else has anything to add.