I've been asked to give users the ability to upload existing Word documents or to create a new Word document within our application as part of editing a mailing template. The editing should occur within a frame as it would be part of a large page.
Are there third-party components for the import and UI or even better does Office 365 allow this type of functionality?
You can use Office Online to integrate view/editing of office documents. For more information see Integrating with Office Online.
The end solution, which is robust, secure and high performance was to use IT Hit WebDAV Server for .NET.
https://www.webdavsystem.com
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In one of our projects am storing the msword document in DB, modifying the word document programatically and generating pdf, which is working fine.
One of the usecase In the word document is, if user links an excel sheet with paste special link option.
This link works i.e data change in the excel reflects in the word document till the both the files in the end users local machine.
This does not work when the word document is saved to DB as blob and generating the pdf from that blob.
Reason identified is linked excel sheet in the word is not in the same path. So i was trying to figure out the link using aspose word api and trying to manipulate.
Any help on this is highly appreciated
The Considerations for server-side Automation of Office states the following:
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should try to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution. Or, you should try to find alternatives that allow at least part of the code to run client-side. If you use an Office application from a server-side solution, the application will lack many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully. Additionally, you will be taking risks with the stability of your overall solution.
You may consider using the Open XML SDK or any third-party components designed for the server-side execution (like you chose).
Please consider a case as show in the image below...
I have two different apps (content + navigation) in a same excel sheet that are able to communicate with each other,
Based on this scenario, following are some questions...
1- Is it possible to deliver an excel document (standalone) which contains both of these apps, so that the end user doesn't need to insert these apps from the ribbon toolbar and user could be able to use this document on any machine (without any configurations and involving the app store/network)?
2- Is it possible to automate the process of generating excel documents that contains both of these apps? My purpose of doing this automation is to change the data contained in excel sheets, and user can perform analysis with his data.
Thanks!
Asif
I asked the same question on msdn forums and got some feedback by them, you may follow the link below for details...
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/057723f1-cfe5-4f41-9d7a-430cb2f0c4c6/create-a-distributable-excel-document-with-web-apps?forum=appsforoffice&prof=required
Based on these details, my understanding is that Office 2013 web apps don't currently support standalone deployments packaged with local html files. But in future they might think of providing support for disconnected mode web apps in Office 2013.
Your comments are welcome!
Thanks,
Asif
Our product is going to support Word(and PDF) report generation, and I'm investigating on which techniques to choose.
Currently what I know is Word automation and OpenXML SDK. There are pros & cons of each.
Do you have any experiences, suggestions or comments about these two or any other techniques? Or is there any third-party utilities/products(may be based on the previous two techniques or not) we can use? We want to analyze as many possible solutions as possible.
If you have the choice I'd go for OpenXML any day of the week.
It has quite a number of advantages over Office Automation.
The most interesting one for me is the fact that it can run on a server, where Office Automation can't (because you need an instance of office on the pc/server running your software). That brings us to my second point, it doesn't need an instance of Office to generate your documents, where Office automation needs one. (This is because office automation will run an instance of office in the background and perform all your actions on it).
Especially when we are talking about large documents or being able to generate quite a few at the same time, OpenXML will perform a lot better than Office Automation because of this.
To make a long story short, Office automation is a thing of the past, openXML is the future ;)
If you want to dive into OpenXML, take a peek here: OpenXML Developer
Good luck !
For PDF generation I used http://www.html-to-pdf.net in past. This provides good support and I assume can be used to generate word documents as well... Check out there website...
If you are using Web forms, I faced one issue with HTTPS - which I listed the solution here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sajoshi/archive/2010/12/13/using-pdfconverter-http-www-html-to-pdf-net-with-https-in-asp-net-mvc.aspx
Docmosis offers a cloud service that can produce MS Word and PDF output via a simple api. The report or document templates are either Word or Open Office documents which can be edited and maintained by non-developers. Once uploaded to the system your application can then simply call the service and specify the data to inject into the document(s) as either JSON or XML. The result is then streamed back, emailed, or placed in storage for access later. Output can be doc, pdf, or html.
The service offers a wide range of templating features and so supports quite complex reporting requirements.
The best thing we found was that cosmetic changes to the output could be handled by the document authors and not the developers which saved us heaps of valuable time (not to mention saving the sanity of our developers).
www.docmosis.com
If you want to build your documents in code, the OpenXML SDK is definitely the way to go. It is a very well designed API that makes full use of LINQ type syntax. One you're up to speed on it you will find it very powerful and easy to use.
With that said, you then have all the logic of your document in code. And change requires a change in your code and that tends to become a pain over time. If you want a system where you design the document in Word you've got a couple of choices - and Word automation is the worst. Even Microsoft says don't do Office automation on a server.
One of the best choices where you design in Word is Windward Reports (disclaimer - I'm the CTO there). With Windward you get the power and ease of Word for your design and new documents or revisions of existing documents don't require a change in code. Other products that take this approach are XpertDoc and SoftArtisans (although both of them do have a code component with each template).
I want to display and edit MS Excel File from client side using ActiveX COM object. The user would be allowed to edit the file and save it to local PC. Then It can be uploaded to remote server.
So, can you give me some example of displaying Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc document in Internet Explorer 8.0 using COM. I could not find such ocx files for that purpose . Can you help me finding it.
Thanks
Maksud
I think those controls would violate the MS Office distribution or EULA licensing agreements with Microsoft. Since an ActiveX control that emulates Word, Excel, PowerPoint would potentially give unlimited and anonymous users access to the software without paying for it. There's other Microsoft technologies that allow you to leverage the end-user's MS Offices licenses that allow them to save back to the web server. I think WebDAV used to be used (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781730%28WS.10%29.aspx), I don't know what's out there now, but I'm sure there's a solution.
I wonder if the use of Google Docs would solve these issues. I'm pretty sure there's a way to leverage some sort of mix of Google Docs and the associated APIs to do something akin to what you are trying to do. I admit this isn't quite a perfect match for your goals.
This sounds like a use case that Office Live Workspace was created for. It's free, it's collaborative, and it allows you to determine sharing permissions.
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I need to take a Word document that is a template of sorts...collect user input to populate specific fields in that template..then generate a PDF file that includes the completed template as well as a few other document types. Does anyone have a good suggestion on a component to achieve this? Preferably one that does not require Microsoft Office to be installed on the web server.
Try Aspose Words for .net. From their website: "Aspose.Words enables .NET and Java applications to read, modify and write Word® documents without utilizing Microsoft Word." Utilizing Aspose Words with Aspose PDF permits you to output to PDF.
One thing you do NOT want to do is install MS Word on your production server. Loading those objects is SLOW and EATS memory. You won't be able to use the CutePDF Writer unless you also install MS Word on the server. Yeck.
Is there a reason to use Word? If you start with a PDF with Form fields, you can either allow the user to fill out the fields, or do it programatically with iTextSharp's PDF stamper.
If you need to use MSOffice 2000/2003 components programmatically, you can try Office Web Components. They do need to be installed on the server, but can be used by .NET and Com apps to interact with office file types. More info here...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Web_Components
If you dig about on an office CD you should find the OWC installer for your version. I haven't worked with 2007, but I assume there is something similar available.
iTextSharp and OWC are no-cost, check the licensing for more details.
Hmmm...You might be able to employ CutePDF printer in a creative way to solve this problem. Essentially, it takes anything that can be fed through a standard print driver and makes a PDF out of it. It's free.
Try using The Apache POI API to populate the fields. It can get into Word documents and access their elements.
As for the Word -> PDF step, I'd also recommend evaluating the Aspose solution. It may even be able to perform both steps. Its not free, however.
My first thought for a "doc template" + merge to pdf solution would be to start with open office formats. - the odt file (open document template) is xml-based - so you could even use perl, to do the merge, then call writer's doc 2 pdf (I have no idea if they have an API, but one could find out in less than a day - even if one had to examine the source.)
and converting your "word" dot to a writer odt file is just a "file save as" operation in OoWriter.
If you use Aspose.Words, then your input document/template can be in one of the several supported formats including DOC, DOCX.
Then you can insert data into the document in a number of ways. You can use bookmarks in a document and just set their text. Or better yet use the reporting engine we provide. It allows to use standard MS Word MERGEFIELD fields plus adds capabilities for repeating regions and even nested. E.g. you can design an invoice (with parent/child data) template in MS Word and then populate from a .NET DataSet in one line of code.
Also, you only need Aspose.Words to produce PDF (a year ago you needed both Aspose.Words and Aspose.Pdf). You can also easily save the exactly the same looking document to DOC, DOC, DOCX and a few other formats.
I'm on the Aspose.Words dev team.
Have a look at the Muhimbi PDF Converter Web Services. It runs on Windows as a service, but can be accessed from any non-Windows web services capable environment including Java and .NET.
Although this solutions requires MS-Office to be installed on a server (not necessarily the same server as your application), it is very robust and provides perfect conversion fidelity.
To generate or Modify MS-Word files I recommend using the free Open XML SDK for Microsoft Office. Eric White maintains a really good Blog about it.
Disclaimer, I worked on this product. Having said that, it works great.