A great deal of hunting around for a solution to my dynamically-generated PowerPoint file project has lead to frustration.

Yes, technically, it can be done throug Automation of MS Office, BUT in this case it has to be done on a remote server, and few ISP's want to install MS Office, or they charge an arm and a leg for it. Then there's MS' own dire warnings about Office components not being intended for servers and therfore being unstable.

Yes, technically, it can be done using OpenOffice's PPT-clone which has both XML-support and a PPT export filter. BUT, OO can only be installed/run with X-server (or at least vncxserver, etc.) also installed, and, same thing - noone wants to do that to their production servers.

Besides, both solutions would be bloated by the install of these huge programs, and probably terribly slow, what with start-up latency and all.

All I want to do is change a dozen numbers in a chart in a PPT slide presentation file. The file already exists as a template.

Soooooooooooooooo - I'm down to the unenviable solution of directly editing the binary ppt file. My question to my fellow Monks is - can it be done in Perl? (and if so, how would be appreciated)

Thanks.

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