Hi Grygonos, thanks for the help. I tried to use your code to generate a chart instead, but had no luck. I find this OLE stuff very tricky!

I am trying to graph some data. The easiest way to show you what I'm trying to do is to show you the spreadsheet, have a look at the picture on my home node.

To make life easier, I created a template spreadsheet, which I open and insert the data into. (Although I would prefer not to use a template, and create the entire spreadsheet on the fly.) The problem occurs when the data range does not match the range in the template. Say I designed the graph to cope with 31 days worth of data, and the user only wants to plot 7 days worth of data. What happens is that the 1st 6 days of data occupy the same area as the fisrt 6 days of 31 days worth of data.

So, I started a macro, and changed the data range of the chart to match the data, and it cured the problem. However, when I tried to convert the macro so I could do this from perl, it didn't work.

The macro looked like this: 

Sub Macro1()
    Sheets("Graph").Select
    ActiveSheet.ChartObjects("Chart 1").Activate
    ActiveChart.SeriesCollection(1).Select
    ActiveChart.SetSourceData Source:=Sheets("Data").Range("A1:C49"), 
+PlotBy:= _
        xlColumns
End Sub

[download]
From this macro, I produced this script. It doesn't work as expected though. If you un-comment the '$chart -> delete();' line, the chart does get deleted, so I know I've got the chart, but the marked line causes an error, and the data range doesn't get changed. 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE qw(in with);
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Excel';
use Win32::OLE::Variant;
use Win32::OLE::NLS qw(:LOCALE :DATE);
$Win32::OLE::Warn = 0;

my $template = "D:/My Scripts/test_chart.xls";
my $outexcel = "D:/My Scripts/test_chart1.xls";

my $excel;
eval {$excel = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Excel.Application')};
die "WARNING! Excel not installed" if $@;
unless (defined $excel) {
    $excel = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application', sub {$_[0]->Quit;}) 
+or die "ERROR, cannot start Excel";
}

$excel -> {Visible} = 1;
$excel->{DisplayAlerts} = 0;

die "Cannot find template $template\n" unless (-e $template);

my $workbook = $excel -> Workbooks -> Open($template);

my $range = "A1:C49";
my $sheet = $workbook -> Worksheets("Graph");
$sheet -> Activate();

my $chart = $sheet -> ChartObjects("Chart 1");
$chart -> Activate();
my $collection = $chart -> SeriesCollection(1); 
$collection -> Select(); # Can't call method "Select" on an undefined 
+value
$chart->SetSourceData({Source => "$sheet", Range => "$range", PlotBy =
+> "xlColumns"});
# $chart -> delete(); #This will work!

# save the spreadsheet
$workbook->SaveAs($outexcel);
undef $workbook;
undef $excel;
exit();

[download]
The data is on sheet2 (named "Data") and occupies a range of A2:C745, if there is a full month's worth. The headings for the columns are in A1:C1.

On sheet1, called "Chart" is a chart of this data. I have put a picture of these sheets on my home node.

In reply to Re^2: Excel macro to perl conversion. by spikey_wan
in thread Excel macro to perl conversion. by spikey_wan

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