Have you ever thought of creating a PowerPoint component. I'd really like the ability to create PowerPoint presentations from within my apps. Although, I'm not sure I need to read them.
It did strike me your knowledge of the Excel file format may give you a head start (if only that you know Microsoft's general file format philosophy), and you may be a good person to make this a reality.
Thanks for the vote of confidence :) You know an interesting fact, much of the powerpoint file format is already coded into FlexCel, since all the shapes/object layer in Excel is shared with powerpoint. Excel changes the "master shape" to be a sheet, while in powerpoint it is a slide, but the rest is exactly the same, in fact, they use the same docs. I think we could even have a render engine using the current FlexCel render engine for embedded objects, since it is the same.
So yes, I've evaluated sometimes doing a powerpoint component. (and a word component, I think there would be more demand for word, but on the other side, it would be much easier to do powerpoint since the hard work is already done). But this being said, the truth is that I've never got the time to do it. I've been coding the Excel API for more than 10 years now, and there are still things to do, the thing is huge (and includes things like an almost full powerpoint implementation as said). So at least by the moment, I prefer to keep focusing in Excel, and have one "perfect" Excel implementation instead of "kind of works" excel and powerpoint. Sometimes you need to say "no" to things even if as in this case most of the work is already done.
2012 was the year of FlexCel for delphi, we managed to put back all the features we had coded over the years in FlexCel for .NET. 2013 I want to be a year of polishing, adding little things, and implement the rest of things not yet in .net or vcl. So at least for the moment, I don't really have too much time to dedicate to something else, even if I would love to.
I always respect the decision to keep focused. In this case I'd also point out you'll probably never reach perfection with Flexcel since Microsoft will always be moving the goalposts. Since there currently isn't any PowerPoint component, anything, no matter how basic, would be welcomed by the market. Could you create a 'basic" PowerPoint component / library with two weeks' work? Maybe a month? Then you'd have a whole new stream of income.