Editing Microsoft Word Documents Programmatically

Question

I want to know if this could be done.

I am building a data dictionary for our software system (school project), and I\'m thinking of an automated way to do this. Bas

Answer 1

Word automation, as suggested by others, will lead you to a world of hurt for two major reasons:

1. Office is not intended to be run unattended, so it can pop up message boxes at any time, and
2. It is (probably) not licensed to enable office functionality for computers which don't have it. If you generate a Word document on a web site using automation, you have to make sure that this functionality cannot be reached by computers which don't have office installed (unless they changed this rule in the last years).

I have used Aspose.Words, it costs a little, but it works well and is intended for this.

Answer 2

Using COM programming is not the best way as mentioned by erikkallen, I suggest using OPEN XML. It is really easy to use and your document generation operation will be very fast.

http://blog.goyello.com/2009/08/21/how-to-generate-open-xml-file-in-c-in-4-minutes/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx

Answer 3

Not exactly sure what you really want, but creating word documents with c# shouldn't be any problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316384

Answer 4

If i find out your purpose correctly you need to visit this microsoft msdn link

Manipulating Word 2007 Files with OpenXML

Answer 5

Definitely possible. A fairly easy way of doing it using Office Automation. See this KB article for a basic sample: How to automate Microsoft Word to create a new document by using Visual C#

I think the main difference to that sample will be that you'll open your template and do SaveAs instead of creating a new document, but I can't remember exactly.

However, depending on your exact requirements, there might be better alternatives. For example, it's not recommended to do Office Automation on servers (including on webservers), so if that's needed you might want to look at something else.

Answer 6

You can use com interop of .net framework.

Understanding the Word Object Model from a .NET Developer's Perspective

Building COM Objects in C#