[Melbourne-pm] real world business issues: file formats

[David Dick]

On 28/12/10 21:15, john thornton wrote:
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>             I want to raise some nitty gritty issues of day to day
> business life. This is practical stuff. It's not some academic theory.

Lots of very practical people here. :)

>        That almost sounds like a job for some perl person ? :) Write a
> perl program for file comparison!

Okay.  Some things that may help you. Apologies if this isn't helpful, 
but i'm a little busy atm.

Win32::OLE

This module allows you to programatically control Word as a OLE object. 
  Read the following documentation for the actual module, and for 
another one that actually uses Win32::OLE to control Microsoft Word. 
These modules would help you if you need to extract data from a Word 
document.

http://search.cpan.org/~jdb/Win32-OLE-0.1709/lib/Win32/OLE.pm
http://search.cpan.org/~johanl/Win32-Word-Writer-0.03/lib/Win32/Word/Writer.pm

Win32::GuiTest

Don't be put off by the name, this excellent module allows you to drive 
any Win32 gui program (such as Microsoft Word) externally, by selecting 
windows, entering keystrokes, pressing buttons, etc.  This would help 
you if you wanted to automate a series of repetitive tasks.

http://search.cpan.org/~karasik/Win32-GuiTest-1.58/lib/Win32/GuiTest.pm
http://www.piotrkaluski.com/files/winguitest/docs/index.html

hope this helps.  For the record, this sounds like it will take a fair 
chunk of someones time.