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Simple Template Based PDF Reports in .Net

My customer gave me some Word and Powerpoint documents which specify how certain 'reports' generated by our product are supposed to look like.
That means, I need to modify those documents (replace placeholders etc.) and then I need to export them as PDF.
How would you solve this problem in C# ?
TL;DR: Editing the office document is no problem at all, but exporting that document to PDF (using Interop) allegedly causes issues when running it as a web server application. That's the whole problem here.

I agree that Interop is not suitable for document manipulation in server environment. I would approach this problem by preparing MS Word template documents with placeholders for data. Then I would use c# to load the data for the reports and merge the data with templates to get final documents (docx, pdf, xps or various image formats). There are 3rd party toolkits which make it quite easy. Here is the code used by one such toolkit needed for merging xml data with the template to get a pdf document:
XElement customers = XElement.Load("Customers.xml");
DocumentGenerator dg = new DocumentGenerator(customers);
DocumentGenerationResult result = dg.GenerateDocument("MyTemplate.docx", "MyReport.pdf");
You can of course also use free libraries and SDKs based on OpenXML but you should expect a steep learning curve, lots of debugging and lots of time invested.

Wkthmltopdf might be an option.

A completely different "report approach" could be, to save those office documents with the placeholders as mht (That's MHTML a web archive format). This could be done directly in MS Office or even programatically.
The placeholders could be easily exchanged by string search and replace. The mht files could directly be used to show the report instead of the PDF. A clear disadvantage of the mht format, is the HTML formatting. With PDF you have a clear and fix positioning.
We are using this kind of report creation. There are some flaws, but it works and the customer could edit the mht templates directly by right-click Open-With the prefered MS Office flavor.

You can use report generators, like FastReport.Net for solving your problems. It can assign different data for placeholders and also allow export to PDF.

How to disable Word 2013 PDF edition?

I'm currently working with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word to open a .docx file and convert to PDF. In order to do that, I'm doing this :
Opening the .docx file with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Documents.Open()
Exporting this document as a PDF with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word._Document.ExportAsFixedFormat()
I used this method ("Call the Protect method of the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document that you want to protect") : https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms178793(v=vs.110).aspx
I have my PDF file, but I can open it in Microsoft Word and edit it... I don't want this PDF to be editable and I must use Word automation to make the PDF.
My question is in the title:
How to disable Word 2013 PDF edition?

It's not possible to change the way Word converts to PDF. There are some options that can be set, using the method you use, but the basic code can't be changed. If you want special things it might be worthwhile to invest in Adobe Acrobat and/Or its API. Since PDF is Adobe's file format its product will have all the special things - it doesn't license some of these things to third parties (such as Microsoft).

editable word document attachment

Its a general scenario when we provide an option of attaching a file (MS .doc) to end user. This file is stored in DB as binary. When user try to access this attachment next time, we allow them to download it. Now, here I want to give a feature to user where he should be able to open this doc file on click, edit it and save it without downloading.

.doc is a binary format and not easy to work with - a library such as Aspose, as mentioned by Christian, is definitely the way to go.
However, if .DOCX is acceptable (and that's Office 2007 and higher), then you can achieve what you want in three steps:
Convert .docx to HTML
Convert Word to HTML then render HTML on webpage
Display the HTML using any rich text control of your choice
What is the best rich textarea editor for jQuery?
Finally, convert HTML back to .docx:
Convert Html to Docx in c#

You would have to "reinvent" Microsoft Office Online (look into your skydrive account). I am unsure if there are any "out of the box" libraries for that, but you could build a simple editing app by leveraging Aspose word (or some other library). But that would be far from simple.
Link to aspose: http://www.aspose.com/.net/word-component.aspx

Word will only open files that are locally stored. What you are looking for is something similar to editing items that SharePoint provides using the WebDAV interface.
You may be able to use this approach to support your requirement. You should be cautious about the security aspects of the solution unless you have fully authenticated access to the shared folder on the server.

I am not sure if a standalone MS Word Document editor exists. However, this can be done with using a combination of rich text formatting / converting tool (for example, the DevExpress ASPxHtmlEditor + Document Server):
Load binary data from a DB;
Import loaded data (MS Word content) as HTML content into the ASPxHtmlEditor;
Edit imported data via the WYSIWYG ASPxHtmlEditor;
Convert the edited HTML back to MS Word content;
Save the converted / edited MS Word content back to the DB.
I believe, it is possible to do something like this if you have such products (free or commercial analogs) in your project.

Inserting a Word document content (with formatting) in a RDLC report using C#

I'm creating a RDLC report in C#. Is it possible to insert the content of a Word 2003 document (with formatting) in it (either in design time or programmatically) before exporting to PDF. The final result will be a PDF file containing the initial report (fields from database) and the Word document content following it.
Why this? I need to give the user the possibility to fill a form, attach a word document and export the all to PDF as I described earlier (ASP.NET). I don't have Word installed on the server so I can't Interact with its COM objects.
Thank you.

Which format does the word document use? If it's .docx, you can try going with the Open XML SDK from Microsoft.
Not sure about how to import the formatting.

This question was asked a long time ago, so I doubt this answer will be of much use to the OP, but if someone else stumbles across this as I did...
...I would think it should be fairly easy using a 3rd party component to convert the doc to an image and then use that in the RDLC without much hassle at all.

How Can I Embed a Word Document in Silverlight?

I need to Embed the Word Document in silverlight,and i need to have all the same functionality of Word Document.
Like Cut,Copy,Paste,Save,Save us,Formating Etc.
How can i Achieve this?.
Also Suggest me some links too.

SL4 comes with COM automation support mean if client machine has Word installed SL can use it to display work doc:
http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/185680/424357.aspx
http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/MS-Word-Mail-Merge-with-Silverlight-4-COM-Automation.aspx
If you are using SL3.. it will be a little daunting... may be you will have to find some RTE to display word in it.
Regards.

The problem with using the COM model to read the file is that you must run the Silverlight app out of the browser with Elevated privileges and the user mush have Word installed so not very useful if you want a web app.
However Word documents are storred as XML files inside a zipped file (rename file from name.docx to name.zip to see the files) so you could always write a class to read in the XML and display it inside a Rich Text Box and then after formatting write it out to a XML form, this will take a lot of effort.