PowerPoint report?

[Ian.W]

I need to dump a series of graphs into a PowerPoint file.

My skill level is such that I benefit greatly from the ActiveX "Report" function panels, like the excelreport.fp.

However, I see there is no powerpointreport.fp with CVI6.0 and in fact there is virtually no discussion forum activity on "PowerPoint" at all -- in any forum.

I'm about to start with the sample PowerPoint slide show controller sample program (simple2000.prj) and use it as my starting point, but before I do:
- Is there a powerpointreport.fp that will come with my upgrade to 7.1, or available elsewhere?
- Is there any reason to me to re-think my plans?

Thanks in advance,
Ian

[MJF]

Is there a particular reason why your graphs need to go to PowerPoint?

I am assuming you are exporting these graphs in some sort of image file format like a bitmap or PNG.

If so, you could present them in an HTML or XML document with a lot less trouble than you could with PowerPoint. Just something to think about, especially since web browsers are everywhere whereas copies of PowerPoint are not.

[Ian.W]

Good question, Martin. Thanks for the perspective.

The information is to be used in an educational setting, usually as a slideshow. That way it reveals, in a step by step matter, the sequence of plots etc.

Your advice to consider HTLM / XML sits well with me, but I suspect it will not meet the instructors needs.

However, I'm not too familiar with XML, and perhaps it might have more to offer for this situation than HTML does. I will look into it.

More comments welcome, either on PowerPoint or XML ideas ....

Thanks,
Ian

[bilalD]

XML might make the task easier, but too bad powerpoint does not have the ability to save/load presentations as XML.

CVI 7.x does not have a powerpoint report fp. Its not very common to auto generate reports (well, atleast for test and measurement systems) in power point. The Word and Excel report fp's are basically thin wrappers around the Word and Excel automation wrappers that make some common tasks easier. So it should'nt be too complicated to create your own wrapper for powerpoint once you break down your tasks. The wrappers can give you some idea of error handling strategies and provide examples on how to use the object model. You can find the wrappers under C:\Program Files\National Instruments\CVI71\toolslib\activex\. The report code is wordreport.c and excelreport.c

I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the Powerpoint object model. This MSDN doc is a good place to start. Then its just a matter of mapping the object model functions to the CVI generated wrapper code.This might help as well.

Maybe once you are finished with this, you would post your powerpoint report fp as example code.

Good luck with your project.

[LuisG]

Ian,

There is a shipping example program that shows CVI working with the native Powerpoint interface. It's in samples\activex\powerpoint\simple2000.prj. You might want to try it out and see if it helps you to get started.

Luis
NI

[MJF]

Actually, you can do a slide show type presentation with a series of HTML documents. You can use simple links to go to the next page, previous page, beginning or end of the presentation. It would not be hard to generate such a thing.

It's not fancy but it works and is very easy to implement. With a little extra effort, you can even do timed presentations or transition effects with a combination of Javascript and CSS.

[Ian.W]

A couple of notes on things I've found:

1. For the record, PowerPoint actually does read and save in HTML/XML. However, if you try saving a simple "Hello World" PowerPoint presentation in HTML, you'll see there are quite a few complex files produced! This would be a viable option, but seems like would require quite some time for me. BTW, I found this to be a *very* clear and quick intro to XML. I highly recommend reading as far as you can get in 2-3 minutes, if you're at all curious as to what XML is.

2. Yes, Bilal, "excelreport.fp" does seem to be a pretty thin wrapper -- you've increased my optimism that I'll be able to make a "pptreport.fp" that will meet my needs.

3. Since my users will want to annotate the presentation with arrows, etc. I'm going to need to end up in PowerPoint anyway. So, based on 1&2, I think I'll try it directly with ActiveX.

Thanks everyone,
Ian

[MJF]

I think you misunderstand my suggested approach Ian.

I am suggesting that you skip PowerPoint altogether and simply generate the HTML files yourself. HTML is a simple markup language, you can directly output the HTML into a text file and completely skip the trouble of using ActiveX.

Sometimes we get a particular approach stuck in our heads and can't see that there is a simpler way to do what we want.

And don't get me started on the nightmare that any MS Office application outputs when you export a file as HTML. There is so much unnecessary BS there as to make the files unreadable and uneditable.

[Ian.W]

Martin,

Perhaps you are right about getting stuck in the wrong approach, here, but I think I still need to get to PowerPoint.

I agree that I could make a series of HTML pages that would be just as displayable in a class as PowerPoint. For many that would be an excellent solution - simple, elegant, portable, etc.

The sticking point for me is that the instructors need to be able to easily take the output and annotate it by circling things, adding text boxes, arrows, etc. As far as I can see, they need to do that in PowerPoint, as it is a known tool for them. Also, it is often used for integrating other parts of the class material. Unfortunately this is the reality I face.

However I think there is an HTML approach that might also work: use HTML as an easy intermediate step that could be imported into PowerPoint. To do that, I would need a set of HTML tags, that when interpreted by PowerPoint during import, would have the effect of:

• signaling the need for a new slide
• specifying the title of the slide, and
• putting in the graphic image
.

The difficulty is finding out the rules as to how PowerPoint intreprets HTML tags. I did some trial and error testing without too much success, and web searches but did not find anything.

Anyone have ideas on that front?

[MJF]

Ah, now I see the need to do it in PowerPoint.

OK, so then you should probably forget about saving things in HTML and just do it in the native format.

Another possibility for annotation is to export into PDF format. I don't know if Adobe Acrobat has an ActiveX server interface or how complex it might be but it could be another option.