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

[dwayne]

On Friday 04 May 2001 13:04, Luther, Ron wrote:
> 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.

does the client like having the data in excel? if so, and if perl's an 
option, you might want to look into the perl module Win32::OLE.
http://velocity.activestate.com/code/cpan/w/wi/Win32-OLE.html

that way you can probably keep the data and charts the same, but replace the 
nasty macros (10K+ lines?! ouch).

you can munge your data as you will, dump it into excel, access OLE objects, 
methods and properties. i'm not sure about moving the results into 
PowerPoint, but if you have a PDF print driver installed, you can print to 
that. i haven't used the module much, i just checked into printing excel 
reports to PDF with it a while back, but it looked handy.

from the docs:
"This module provides an interface to OLE Automation from Perl. OLE 
Automation brings VisualBasic like scripting capabilities and offers powerful 
extensibility and the ability to control many Win32 applications from Perl 
scripts."

hth
- dwayne

The Win32::OLE module uses the IDispatch interface exclusively. It is not 
possible to access a custom OLE interface. OLE events and OCX's are currently 
not supported."