I have a PHB who has asked that I submit two excel sheets and a text report, weekly, summarizing, I guess, what I do. At first, I was too verbose, and he said "write less." Then he said I was not being verbose enough, and he said "explain in more detail. consider your audience." Quickly I tired of this, took his example verbatim, and made a perl script out of it.

So now I just run tpsreports.pl and I fill in the fields it prompts me for. Okay, that's fine. He's now (I really couldn't make this up) insisted that it also be in times new roman, twelve point. Okay, so I'll switch from .txt to .rtf. Word will open that bad boy right up (so much for fixed-width ascii eh).

What bugs me is the excel sheets. Picture a seven by seven matrix, with the columns being days of the week, and the rows being the form of mediocrity, so you'd have "selling ice cream" and "abducting children" and "fixing the van" and "chatting up kids on the internet" and so on as rows.

I can do that pretty simply in a csv, except that I think he will be unhappy if I do not actually include the colors he has so thoughtfully supplied in his tps.xls spreadsheet (grey, green, and yellow). Is there a way to create these sorts of objects in perl?

Bear in mind one caveat. While I hate doing this sort of nonsense ("I wouldn't really say I've been working, Bob..."), let us remember that the reason I am asking is laziness and impatience. by having to invoke some mega module to create a giant Microsoft::Office::2003::Excel::TPS::Colored object, I've essentially defeated the whole point of reducing the amount of time I spend actually filling these crap reports out (although I will admit I will gain a large amount of satisfaction via that clever thinkgeek slogan - go away, or I will replace you with a very small <s>shell</s>perl script).

Anyone have suggestions?

Thanks,
brother dep

(kinda surprised to see it's been, gasp, another year...)