use Perl

• Using Perl to produce PowerPoint presentations (Score:2)

  by bart (450) <bart.lateur@pandora.be> on 2007.01.16 16:51 (#52733) Journal

  So now we can use Perl to produce PowerPoint presentations... You may not believe this, but over the last years we've had many questions in that area, mainly from Perl newbies, on the Chatterbox on PerlMonks. We used to have to say "No you can't". Now we can say "Yes you can!".
  
  I quickly glanced at the source, and it quickly revealed what I had already suspected, based on the module name: it uses Win32::OLE to do its magic. So this means you have to have MS-PowerPoint, and have to have it installed. (When I get MS-Office from work, I tend to not install PowerPoint.) Oh, and you must use it on Windows, too. ;-)
  
  So one can still dream of a module like SpreadSheet::ParseExcel/SpreadSheet::WriteExcel, that parses/generates the native PowerPoint format, but without using Microsoft's program. (Which I hate.) Producing the muck people tend to expect, but without getting your hands dirty.

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by ishigaki (7238)

    Sadly yes, we need Windows and MSOffice at hand, though there must be some way to do without them, as there're several viewers/converters around. I selected Win32::OLE mainly because I once was (am?) a VB programmer, but if you know some free C(++) libraries, please let me know.