Aspose.Slides for .Net questions and help request

After reviewing the demos, documentation, and some blog entries; I have a few questions.

First, from doing a search for your site, I found a blog entry that stated the Northwind example had been packaged for download; but the link is broken! Does this mean one is no longer able to download this example?

Second, in the very basic view of the code from the online demos, I see this example outputs to a PPT file, Office 2003 or earlier. Has it ever been considered to enhance this example to produce a PPTX presentation? Or both?

I know from experience that creating a presentation in 2007 and saving as 2003; that a 100% conversion does not take place. So there are differences in the 2 versions. Also from reviewing the forum posts, I have seen from the replies that there are indeed coding changes between the two.

Third, the PptBrowser example that is installed with the product, when I run it and click the ‘Get as Ppt’ button, the presentation that opens has an extra blank slide at the beginning; why? Of course; I do have Office 2007 installed, could that be the problem here?

Also I saw from some other forum questions, that were not answered (to me) satisfactorily about trying to determine when and how to create an extra slide to contain form data than would not fit on single slide. From what I have seen of ALL the examples in either the download or install of Aspose.Slides or the web site of what would be considered real world examples that would include something like this.

But I really have to say that is a complaint against all software companies in the world. It’s just that one would think that for a company that has such a high cost for just one tool what actually have better examples of using their tool.

So I’m asking for any help available of taking a lot of data from a SQL Server 2005 database and be able to output that (which is currently being done to Word in a different tool) to both 2003 and 2007 presentations! This data includes both large text blocks and table data.

RBarbre

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your interest in Aspose.Slides.

I will address your queries in sections.

RBarbre:

After reviewing the demos, documentation, and some blog entries; I have a few questions.

First, from doing a search for your site, I found a blog entry that stated the Northwind example had been packaged for download; but the link is broken! Does this mean one is no longer able to download this example?

Second, in the very basic view of the code from the online demos, I see this example outputs to a PPT file, Office 2003 or earlier. Has it ever been considered to enhance this example to produce a PPTX presentation? Or both?

Kindly share the link that you have found broken so that I may verify that to help your further. We take your words as suggestion and may also add PPTX demo as well in online demos. For the time being, I may refer you to Programmers guide section for handling PPTX presentations.

RBarbre:

I know from experience that creating a presentation in 2007 and saving as 2003; that a 100% conversion does not take place. So there are differences in the 2 versions. Also from reviewing the forum posts, I have seen from the replies that there are indeed coding changes between the two.

Third, the PptBrowser example that is installed with the product, when I run it and click the ‘Get as Ppt’ button, the presentation that opens has an extra blank slide at the beginning; why? Of course; I do have Office 2007 installed, could that be the problem here?

I like to share that Aspose.Slides namespace is used to manage PowerPoint 97-2003 format presentations and Aspose.Slides.Pptx namespace is used to manage PPTX format presentations supported in PowerPoint 2007-2010. These are two separate APIs but bundled together to manage two different forms of presentations.

Secondly, the blank slide you observe is in fact not an issue in the product. Actually, when you create a default presentation object, it will create a presentation with one default empty slide. You can add your slides and just before saving the presentation give call to slide remove method to remove the unused default slide. Please visit this code link for your kind reference.

RBarbre:

Also I saw from some other forum questions, that were not answered (to me) satisfactorily about trying to determine when and how to create an extra slide to contain form data than would not fit on single slide. From what I have seen of ALL the examples in either the download or install of Aspose.Slides or the web site of what would be considered real world examples that would include something like this.

But I really have to say that is a complaint against all software companies in the world. It’s just that one would think that for a company that has such a high cost for just one tool what actually have better examples of using their tool.

So I’m asking for any help available of taking a lot of data from a SQL Server 2005 database and be able to output that (which is currently being done to Word in a different tool) to both 2003 and 2007 presentations! This data includes both large text blocks and table data.

RBarbre

I may request further elaboration of the points shared above to assist your further. But I must say that you can populate data from database in slides using Aspose.Slides. However, there is no mechanism available in Aspose.Slides to tell while filling data in slides that slide overflow has been reached and new slide is to be added at that point. One need to devise his own logic to keep track of shapes (placeholders or Textframes) width or height to dynamically check whether it has reached the slide bottom. One careful approach that is followed usually be our clients is that they use template slides already filled with number of dummy data in slide. The data is read from database and is replaces dummy data. This way you can easily manage the slides text.

I may still request you to share the further details related to this subject. I may help you further on the basis of that.

Many Thanks,