Please think for a moment about the content of your work.

Most of your message is about the design instead of the information you are trying to communicate.

Discussion of Power Point, Basic, Access, Windows, PDF, etc. are meaningless without fully understanding what information you are attempting to clearly assemble in a meaningful way.

I suspect that if you focus on the real need, which I presume to be some charts generated from Access data and located at a URL your job will become much more clear.

My guess is that the Visual Basic is being used to make Powerpoint load some data, graph it, and then save it as a PDF. The graphing functions in Powerpoint may be easy to drive by Visual Basic but the result often mirrors the tool; poor design and poor presentation. You will not be able to automate the generation of Powerpoint charts on Unix.

A Different Approach

This node reminds me of the Feynmann-Tufte Principle. A visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van.

Generate the charts directly from data in perl (using whatever tool you like - I like GD::Chart as well) then save the charts in PDF format. Now you have the charts available for a web page and also for importing into a PowerPoint slide (perhaps using Impress to import and save that file.)

With some effort you may be able to automate the generation of the charts (perhaps as jpg or gif) and make the web page display actual (real time) data. These image will may also be more easily imported into your presentation slides simplifying the process.


SciDude
The first dog barks... all other dogs bark at the first dog.

In reply to Re: Powerpoint on UNIX by SciDude
in thread Powerpoint on UNIX by artist

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