Thanks everyone.

I'm especially encourged by what I've not read. Noone's said "Trivial! Everyone knows you do it like this....here's a hundred online working examples..."

Why PowerPoint? 'Cause the client wants to be able to, on the fly, capture a snapshot of the data over the web at this exact second, and immediately, with no manual intervention of their own, show a slick PowerPoint presentation of the data with all those bells and whistles like slide-fade-in. They don't want just a series of images. They don't want to have to fiddle with Excel as an intermediate step. They want: click a button, get a PowerPoint presentation ready to go.

So anyway - it sounds like:

1. It's at least possible, but not obvious
2. I can quote this as a real development project, not "Just Another Powerpoint Generator".

I appreciate the indications, and I hate to sound thick, but most of the suggestions give me the impression of soething that could work when running on the same machine as the Powerpoint or Excel app. Will it work remotely over the web?

Thanks again.