I've written previously about automating Microsoft PowerPoint with Ruby. Someone recently asked how to use Ruby code to insert hyperlinks into a PowerPoint slide. Let's take a look now at how this can be done.

Setting the Scene

Let's quickly review the code that will launch PowerPoint...

require 'win32ole'

At the end of my last blog about Paperclip I mentioned that you need to do some patching if you want to use European S3 buckets to store your files.

A recent discussion in the Ruby Forum reminded me that it is possible with Microsoft Office 2007 applications to save a document in Adobe PDF format.

In the Microsoft Word object model, you can call the Document object's SaveAs() method, passing it a filename, and the document will be saved in the default format.

document.SaveAs('c:\temp\MyDocument.doc')

If you've hung around here for a little while, then you probably already know that you can use the WIN32OLE.connect() method to connect to a running instance of applications like Microsoft Word. Just pass the method the ProgID of the Application object:

word = WIN32OLE.connect('Word.Application')

I've talked in the past about automating iTunes, and about automating Excel. Let's now look at how to use Ruby to produce an iTunes report in Excel. Our finished product will be a sorted worksheet containing Artist, Year, Album, and Song Name.

As usual, we'll be working with the win32ole library, so include the following at the top of your code:

require 'win32ole'