I need to be able to view a file (.doc, docx, .pdf, .txt,.....ect) in the System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser (C# Visual Studio 2008) on a system that does not have office installed on it. How do I do that? Can it be done? I viewed many of the documentation that are out there regarding this and most all have office installed already. I just need to be able to preview the documents, not modify them.
You can't do this in general. The way a browser displays an Office Document (or any other kind of document) is to run the application that created it - in this case, Office.
There are various tools which can render Office documents as HTML. You may be able to use those. One that I see mentioned frequently is Aspose, though I have not used it.
No, you can't do this using just the WebBrowser.
If you've seen the WebBrowser open a Word doc before, it's because Office was installed on the system, and it was using the Office ActiveX control to view it.
Some alteratives:
Programmatically upload the document to Office Live, then navigate the web browser to it. Office Live now has "Word in a web browser" functionality, check it out here.
Related
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).
I am using Visual Studio and developing an Office add-in. I need to identify same shapes and pictures and replace them.
I try to use OpenXml to do that but it doesn't seem to be able to be modified in files in use. It doesn't seem to work as an office add-in because it doesn't work with files that are already open.
And I have searched for many hours on the internet but not found a way to do that.
Help me please.
Thank you
TL; DR: OpenXML and Office add-ins (including VSTO) are competing technologies for different use cases that may lead to runtime issues if combined. Best to stick to just one.
I am ... developing a office add-in. I need to identify same shapes and pictures and replace them. I try to use OpenXml to do that but it doesn't seem to be able to be modified in files in use.
OpenXML is an API for creating/reading/modifying Office documents (Office 2010+ to be exact) that adhere to the contemporary XML document format such as Word 2010. It does so by manipulating the document directly at the file level rather than using COM. In fact it does not require Word to be installed on the machine at all! This makes OpenXML a rather light-weight approach to interacting with Office documents.
Unfortunately OpenXML (or other file-based approaches) are unsuitable for Office add-ins (VSTO or otherwise) if both are targeting the same document. This is because the document is already loaded into say Word and Word is hosting your add-in. Any attempt to modify the underlying file (including OpenXML by anything but Word or Word APIs) that represents the loaded document will encounter a:
sharing violation
To put this another way:
In order to run your Office add-in the Office app needs to be running first. This is known as hosting
Operations on Office documents orchestrated by your add-in require the document to be loaded into the Office app first
No external Windows process or in-process (add-in) operation can directly change the underlying Office document file whilst it is open in the Office app. (Add-ins can indirectly save to the file using Office APIs and ask the Office app to Save though generally such APIs don't expose any raw file interfaces to the caller so the later is probably not the same thing)
What to do?
My recommendation is to either:
a) use a pure OpenXML approach and discard the Office add-in or...
b) use a pure Office add-in (VSTO) approach and discard the OpenXML code
Considering that it seems you already have code for shapes and pictures via the OpenXML approach, perhaps option a) is the best.
See also
Open XML SDK
Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)
I'm trying to make my program have the ability to display a Microsoft Word file on a form but not having any luck in doing so. I want to be able to open the file and display it on the form as a Read-Only. So basically just display it's contents. Various users on the web have recommended displaying files in the WebBrowser control (under toolbox). I have tried this but failed to get it working. My end goal is to be able to annotate on top of the web browser (or something of similar manner) and subsequently save the annotations along with the opened file.
I'm not that experienced in the C# language too so any help on how to achieve my problem would be greatly appreciated.
You need a DOCX viewer control. My company recently gave away our multi-format WinForms viewer control as a free product - XtremeDocumentStudio .NET Free. It can display DOCX and is available on NuGet. It does not require a Web Browser control for embedding an online viewer or Word software installed locally.
http://www.nuget.org/packages/XtremeDocumentStudio.NETFree/
There are some good links that might help you.
First, you will find a closely related or similar question here
And in that conversation someone posted the following link which is about how to build a user control for displaying Word documents in a webbrowser control.
I also found another article here about how to integrate Excel in a Windows Form application using WebBrowser. But Excel is used as an example and you may be able to adapt it to Word.
I would like to know whether its possible to open Open word 2003 (doc) file using open xml file format API? like office 2007.
I have one windows service through which I am trying to open and edit doc files but getting lot of problems.I have posted question regarding that problem here but got no answer.
After lot of googling, I came across this page which tells about microsoft recommendations of Office automation on server-side code. Microsoft suggests that office automation should not be implemented in server-side code,as office applications are made for interactive client workstations. This page does not tell if its possible and how to open doc files using open xml format API.
Basically, I want one windows service which will take doc file as an input, open it, edit it and save it. How to achieve this?
My development enviornment : C#, .net 2.0 framework, Windows Vista, Office 2003
I think you might be missing the point of Office interop. Using Office interop basically means you communicate with a running Microsoft Office Word/Excel process and manipulate a document/spreadsheet in a defined manner. There is no need to directly modify a word document itself if you use Office interop.
If you wish to modify an Office .doc document directly without the presence of Microsoft Office, then your best bet would be to Google for a library that will directly manipulate .doc for you, although these libraries tend to be fairly buggy, and where they aren't buggy, they're expensive.
EDIT: If you're asking whether or not you can use Office 2007 interop to manipulate a .doc file, then the answer is yes.
You can't. Microsoft introduced office open xml standard from Word 2007. Word 2003 uses binary format.
I know I can display a Powerpoint presentation within my own form (see here), but I'm wondering whether there is a way to get rid of Microsoft Office as a requirement?
I guess basically what I'm asking for is a library which will display Powerpoint slide-shows without my users having to install MS Office on every machine. They do not need to CREATE slide-shows, just display them. Does such a library exist? I have searched all over the place and I'm always referred back to the MS Interop / ActiveX stuff.
Any help is appreciated!
Tom
Try this: PowerPoint Viewer 2007. Also see this thread about embedding a Powerpoint Viewer 2007 instance on a VB.NET form
I believe you can accomplish this with Aspose.Slides. It can open up an PPT file you have, then I think you could save each sheet to a image. Finally, you could show the images in your app.