radomir.kus

to hozawa: I would clearly be easy to create just a powerpoint presentation. The trouble I have is to fill it up with different data several hundred times in an automated way. As for such, PowerPoint is not the best option.

Hey there, i am an absolute beginner to Jaspersoft and in my work we are looking for a solution to the following problem. We need to create roughly 500 powerpoint presentations (unfortunately not pdfs in order to keep the presentations editable) which have the same template but different data (each for several companies and several regions). The slides consist of various elements such as graphs, tables, textfields without any particular pattern repeating over the slides so each slide is basically unique. We need to do quite some statistical precomputing before putting everything into slides (which is done mostly in SPSS and R) so we cant use databases as our data inputs for the presentations but rather some text files formats such as csv. The downside is that the data after to computations are not in the form of one table but more of a mixture of tables, graphs values, legends, images and descriptions. I tried to play around with JSS a little bit and I got an idea to which I would love someone more experienced to comment on. It occured to me to use page header and page footer bands as headers and footers of each slide and for every element on each slide use a subreport with nothing but title so that I could use a specific data (for instance values of a graph) to create the element which would not repeat over all the slides. I found couple of issues which might be or be not feasible to overcome: pagination - on some slides we have tables whose numbers of rows would vary for the presentations and I do not know whether its possible to force the table to "stay on the slide" and not to start a new onegraphs - some graphs show comparison with benchmark so I need to draw a line within the graph showing the benchmark value and in general do some small adjustments to the graphs, e.g. trend lines, ... (how complicated it is to adjust them a bit?)automation - I need JSS to compile the same template with different data for each presentation in an automated way so that there would not have to be anyone "clicking" all the presentations.Any comments would be appreciated Cheers Radek