[thelist] Best Practice? (from DB --> Presentation)

Katherine Spice k.spice at acu.ac.uk
Fri May 4 08:24:16 CDT 2001


Hi Ron,

My approach (and this probably isn't very helpful) would be to do it in
perl using the GD libraries. But, if you don't know perl at all this
probably isn't the best project to cut your teeth on :-) The reason I'm
answering this at all, is because I've been looking into generating pdfs
with perl and found this library:
http://www.pdflib.com/pdflib/index.html which let you create pdfs and
has bindings for ActiveX/COM, C, Java, Perl, PHP, Python and Tcl so if
you find a solution using one of those this might be helpful.

Good luck with this.
Katherine

"Luther, Ron" wrote:
> 
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I've got a user who runs quite a few of my nice reports for pulling
> information out of the database.
> 
> They dump that information into Excel, (run 10's of thousands of lines of
> Excel macros [yes-really] that I've inherited maintenance for -- yuck!),
> make charts, import into Powerpoint and set the 90+ page presentation out on
> the intranet after hand delivering print copies to numerous execs.
> 
> All of which takes an astounding amount of expensive (and boring) manual
> effort and intervention.
> 
> I'd like to automate the whole dang thing and eliminate the manual effort.
> [I'd also like to eliminate the &^%&^* 'unstable' Excel macros that keep
> breaking.]
> 
> Got any suggestions for techniques or technologies?  I think they might be
> persuaded to live with a PDF file instead of a Powerpoint presentation file.
> Technology/platform is fairly irrelevant - I don't care if I have to learn
> something new.
> 
> What would you do?  [Basically - I'm hoping someone will come back and say;
> "look into {module_X or custom_tag_Y} - you feed your recordset in through
> ASP/CF/PHP/CNN/IVs/??? and it lets you create nice business charts and
> summary tables in a familiar format.]
> 
> {Or maybe this is an application where something like Lotus Notes would be
> "best"?}
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> RonL.
> 
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