Best Practices for some Analyst tasks

Hi there,

I am an analyst 1 in a european m&a team.
Looking back to my first 6 months, I observed, that the following tasks took quite a lot of my working time and am wondering how you are tackling these tasks and how I could work more effective following best practices at other firms:

• VDR:

  • Do you use any specific tools to download VDR data (e.g. use tools, which names the downloaded files after the first x words mentioned in the document)?
  • Which tool/s do you use to automate blacklining of documents? Are you aware of a tool, which automatically blacklines names according to a provided list of words, e.g. employee names etc.?
  • Do you use tools to automate the Q&A process, e.g. tools which automatically provide answers to questions, like such which you can find in a lot of forums/in FAQ sections of homepages when working on a sell-side mandate?

• Market studies for pitches/proposals: Beside firm internal information platforms, which platforms, industry specific webpages do you use?

• Benchmarking - how do you automate these tasks / which platforms are best to automate the benchmarking process?

• How do you select your peer groups - which platforms do you use to get good suggestions for peers?

• Are you aware of any automation tool, to populate data into ppt slides from multiple excel files (like a vlookup / indexmatch function in excel)?

I hope this topic helps all analysts to get a bit more sleep and time.
Looking forward to your suggestions and contributions :)

Cheers+