Python vs Visual Basic

[Dave Kuhlman]

<posted & mailed>

Alex Martelli wrote:

> Orange Free wrote:
> 
>> I want to create a program that will ask a user a series of
>> questions and then generate a Microsoft Word document whose
>> content is dictated
>> by the answers.  I am not a professional programmer, and I
>> understand
>> only a little about OO programming.  Should I

[snip]
> 
> May I suggest an alternative?  Perhaps you might be satisfied with
> generating a foo.rtf rather than foo.doc file.  Now, the RTF
> format isn't much easier or better documented than the DOC format,
> but it
> has the advantage that RTF format files are TEXT.  

I've read that the latest version of MS Word (or MS Office?) heavily
uses XML. If that's true, perahps you should consider generating
foo.xml that follows the MS Word XML document definition (again, if
there is such a thing).

Here is a quote from Tim Bray:

<quote>When asked how XML-enabling will make a difference in MS
Office, Bray quickly zeroes in on what in his view is the key
differentiator in an XML-enabled Office suite vs the current one.
"The important thing," he explains, "is that Word and Excel (and of
course the new XDocs thing) can export their data as XML without
information loss. It seems Word can also edit arbitrary XML
languages under the control of an XML Schema, but I'm actually more
excited by the notion of Word files also being XML files."</quote>

And here is a link to the complete article:

http://www3.sys-con.com/xml/rotate.cfm

[snip]

Dave

-- 
Dave Kuhlman
http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman
dkuhlman at rexx.com