Generating Powerpoint PPT with Coldfusion?

Question

Hi all,

Does anyone know if it's possible to generate powerpoint ppts within ColdFusion? I can't rely on the approach of installing a copy of office and generate one through COM and I can't use ooxml since my client is still in the office 2003 era. Any suggestion is much appreciated.

Answer 1

ColdFusion doesn't have built in PPT creation, but you may be able to make something work with OpenOffice.

Look into CFPresentation (CF8), it allows you to create web-based presentations - not actually PPT format, but displayed in the same way via Flash player.

Have you considered using PDF instead? For all intents and purposes except perhaps some animation, PDFs do well replacing PPTs. And CF has tons of PDF creation and manipulation features!

Answer 2

You can try using Apache POI, specifically their Powerpoint support. Looks to be still in beta though:

http://poi.apache.org/slideshow/index.html

I've used POI to extra from Word docs before and it was rather easy in ColdFusion.

Answer 3

I forgot to mention. You should contact Todd Sharp at http://www.slidesix.com. He has written CF code to parse in multiple slide formats.

Answer 4

I know it's not a good answer, but ColdFusion 9 can turn a cfpresentation into a PowerPoint file, and creating a cfpresentation is pretty damned trivial...

However, this of course requires a server that's still in beta, and a large cash outlay once it's released if you're running your own server.

Dan