Creating Charts in Excel

bangers has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

We use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel to create Excel reports upon request. I have been asked to add charts/graphs to some of these reports. WriteExcel has a add_chart_ext method, but the documentations says "This feature is new and would be best described as experimental" it also advises against creating complicated charts and some of the requested charts look complex to me.

Before I start looking into how to get this to work, does anyone have any experience in creating charts using WriteExcel, advice to share or alternatives to suggest?

Please note that our production environment absolutely prohibits me running Windows, OLE or Excel.

Comment on Creating Charts in Excel

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Re: Creating Charts in Excel by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Jun 18, 2009 at 14:22 UTC
At work, we had a similar need due to sales and marketing type folks who live in Excel. We first tried add_chart_ext with no success. Next we did some pretty extensive internet searches with various terms but could not find anything suitable in Perl. (This situation may have changed by now though.) In the end, we succumbed to the Dark Side; we use an older version of POI. (We see no point in upgrading something that has been working for a few years now.)	[reply]

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Re: Creating Charts in Excel
by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Jun 18, 2009 at 14:22 UTC

At work, we had a similar need due to sales and marketing type folks who live in Excel. We first tried add_chart_ext with no success. Next we did some pretty extensive internet searches with various terms but could not find anything suitable in Perl. (This situation may have changed by now though.)

In the end, we succumbed to the Dark Side; we use an older version of POI. (We see no point in upgrading something that has been working for a few years now.)

[reply]