ARTICLE - Why the MS Office file formats is so complicated

Kevin D. Clark kevin_d_clark at comcast.net
Thu Feb 21 10:18:57 EST 2008


Ben Scott writes:

> On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 6:53 PM, Alex Hewitt wrote:
> > I just tried to read these files again with Word and it can read them.
> > I'll see if there's a way to read/convert these files from a batch job.
> 
>   Not a traditional batch file, I don't think, but it should be very
> possible with either (1) VBA or (2) AutoIt.  VBA is "Visual Basic for
> Applications", is built-in to MS Office, and it can do just about
> anything, provided you can stomach the syntax.  Still, for something
> like this, it should do well.  AutoIt is a third-party, freeware
> automation scripting tool for 'doze.  It's kind of like expect(1) for
> the Windows GUI.  It's useful for scripting that which is not designed
> to be scripting.

Perl's libwin32 library (Win32::OLE) might be useful here as well.

Here's an example of somebody using this module to control another
win32 application:

  http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/04/21/win32ole.html

Regards,

--kevin
-- 
GnuPG ID: B280F24E             Don't you know there ain't no devil,
alumni.unh.edu!kdc             there's just God when he's drunk?
                                 -- Tom Waits


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