How can a Word document be created in C #?

Question

I have a project in which I would like to create a report export in MS Word format. The report will contain images / graphs, tables and text. What is the best way to do this? Third party tools? What are your impressions?

Answer 1

The answer will depend slightly on whether the application is running on the server or whether it is running on the client machine. If you are working on a server, then you will want to use one of the formats for generating XML-based office applications, because there are problems with the information if using Office Automation or using the Office Open XML format (see links below), which is supported by Microsoft Office 2000 and either initially or through service packs. One of them pays attention to this, although you cannot insert some types of graphs or images that you want to display.

The best way to get around everything will depend on how much time you need to invest in development. If you are following the Office Automation route, there are many good tutorials that you can find through Google and are easy to learn. However, the Open Office XML format is fairly new, so you may find that the learning curve is slightly higher.

Office Open XML Iinformation

• Office Open XML - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
• OpenXML Developer - http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx
• Introducing Open XML Office File Formats (2007) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx

Answer 2

DocX free library for creating DocX documents that are actively developed and very simple and intuitive to use. As CodePlex dies, the project has moved to github .

Answer 3

The fastest way I've done this in the past is to use XML. Here is a good article to get you started:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164064.aspx

Answer 4

I spent the last week or so speeding on Office Open XML . We have a database application that stores the survey data that we want to communicate in Microsoft Word. In fact, you can create Word 2007 (docx) files from scratch in C #. The Open XML SDK version 2 includes a cool application called Document Reflector, which will actually provide C # code to completely recreate a Word document. You can use parts or all of the code and replace the bits that you want to change on the fly. The help file included in the SDK also has some good code examples.

No need for Office Interop or any other Office software on the server - the new formats are 100% XML.

Answer 5

Have you considered using .RTF as an alternative?

It supports embedding images and tables, as well as text that opens by default using Microsoft Word, and although its set of options is more limited (counts any pre-formatting) for something that looks and feels and opens like a Word document, it not far away,

End users probably won't notice.

Answer 6

I found Aspose Words to be the best, as not everyone can open Office Open XML / * format files. docx and Word interop and Word automation can be a mistake. Aspose Words supports most types of document files from Word 97 up.

This is a payment component, but has great support. Another alternative, as already suggested, is RTF.

Answer 7

To generate Word documents using Office Automation in .NET, specifically in C # or VB.NET:

• Add a link to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word for your project. The path \ Visual Studio Tools for Office \ PIA \ Office11 \ Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll .

• Follow the example Microsoft code you can find here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316384/en-us .

Answer 8

Schmidti, if you want to create Word documents on a web server, you will need a license for each client (and not just for the web server). See this section in the first link Rob posted:

“In addition to technical issues, you should also consider licensing issues. Existing licensing rules do not allow Office applications to be used on the server to service client requests unless the clients themselves have licensed copies of Office. Using server automation to provide Office functionality for unlicensed workstations is not covered End User License Agreement (EULA).

If you meet licensing requirements, I think you will need to use COM Interop - to be specific, Office XP Primary Interop Assemblies .

Answer 9

Check out VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office). Simply create a Word template, insert an XML data object into it, and then send it to the client. When a user opens a document in Word, Word reads the xml and converts it to WordML and displays it. You will want to look at the ServerDocument class of the VSTO library. No additional licensing is required from my experience.

Answer 10

I ran into this problem and created a small library for this. It was used in several projects, and I decided to publish it. It is free and very simple, but I am sure that it will help you to cope with this task. Call the Office Open XML library, http://invoke.co.nz/products/docx.aspx .

Answer 11

I had good success using Syncfusion Backoffice DocIO, which supports the doc and docx formats.

In previous releases, it did not support everything in the word, but according to your list, we tested it using tables and text as a merge method, and it worked fine.

Not sure if importing images. The ad page http://www.syncfusion.com/products/DocIO/Backoffice/features/default.aspx says

Blockquote Essential DocIO supports the insertion of both scalar and vector images into a document in almost all formats. Raster images, gifs, png and tiff are some of the common image types.

Therefore, it is worth considering.

As already mentioned, you can create an RTF document, there are some good RTF libraries for .net, for example http://www.codeproject.com/KB/string/nrtftree.aspx

Answer 12

I wrote aa blog series about opening a WordprocessingML XML document . My approach is that you create a template document that contains content controls, and in each content control you write an XPath expression that defines how to extract content from an XML document that contains data that drives the document generation process. The code is free and licensed under the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) . In the same series of blog posts, I also explore the approach in which you write C # code in content controls. Then the document generation process processes the template document and generates a C # program that generates the necessary documents. One of the advantages of this approach is that you can use any data source as a data source for the document creation process. This code is also licensed under the Microsoft Reciprocal License.

Answer 13

I am currently doing this for sure.

If the document is not very large, it does not contain images, etc., I save it as RTF C # MergeFields # in it and simply replace it with contents, sending the result to the user as RTF.

For large documents, including images and dynamically inserted images, I save the original Word document as a single * .mht web page file containing # MergeFields # again. Then I do the same as above. Using this, I can easily visualize a DataTable with some basic Html table tags and replace one of # MergeFields # with the entire table.

Images can be stored on your server, and the URL is embedded in the document.

Interestingly, the new Office 2007 file formats are actually zip files — if you rename the extension to .zip, you can open them and see their contents. This means that you should be able to switch content, such as images, using a simple C # library.

Answer 14

@Dale Ragan: This will work for the Office 2003 XML format, but it's not portable (like, say, .doc or .docx files).

To read / write them, you need to use the ActiveX control of the Word object library:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/wordapplication.aspx

Answer 15

@Danny Smurf: Actually, this article describes what the Office Open XML format Rob will answer will be. I will pay more attention to the links that I publish now, to make sure that they are not out of date. I actually did a search in WordML, which was what was called at that time.

I believe Office Open XML format is the best way to go.

Answer 16

LibreOffice also supports mute interaction through the API. Unfortunately, currently there is little information about this function. :(

Answer 17

You can also use the Word document generator. It can be used for deployment on the client side or on the server side. From the project description:

WordDocumentGenerator is a utility for creating Word documents from templates using Visual Studio 2010 and the Open XML 2.0 SDK. WordDocumentGenerator helps to create Word documents as non-updatable, as well as updatable based on predefined templates using minimal code changes. Content controls are used as placeholders to create documents. It supports Word 2007 and Word 2010.

Grab it: http://worddocgenerator.codeplex.com/

Download SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5124

Answer 18

Another alternative is Windward Docgen (disclaimer - I am the founder). With Windward, you create a template in Word, including images, tables, graphs, sensors, and everything else you want. You can set tags into which data from an XML or SQL data source is inserted (including functions such as forEach loop, import, etc.). And then generate the report in DOCX, PDF, HTML, etc.