I have several Word templates and I wish to use these to dynamically create Word documents in my app. I wish to avoid using automation at all costs as this is no good. I know that I can use both HTML and XML to create word documents but I just don't know where to start with regards to using a template that may well have images in the footer or the header of a document.
I use the OpenXML SDK with Word 2007. After you get the hang of it, it's not so bad. I have several template docx files that I scan through to search and replace for placeholder strings with what I want, and then can stitch together multiple templates into one document if I want to. It's nice because I can start with docx files as the template and modify them while the whole time staying within the realm of the docx format. If an image is in the docx when you start modifying it, it'll be there after you re-save it after modification (provided you didn't programmatically remove it of course).
If you have more details with what you'll be doing, let us know.
You could use DocX. It's free, very easy to use, with nice tutorials and is feature reach. It works with only DOCX documents thou. Also development is currently on hold until the author will finish his semester. Here's detailed blog about it.
It has good example of using template in his Invoice Example.
MigraDoc http://www.pdfsharp.net/MigraDocOverview.ashx is a free utility for exporting PDF/Word/HTML files. I've not worked with it using templates as yet however, you could use the DDL files to persists a layout for your files to be re-used.
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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.
I have to open a word document using c# and do some changes in that document and save it again. Document will have lot of tables and styling. For example I have to process that document page by page. I have to change all italics to normal and all caps to small letters and save to that document only the changes without affecting the styling and alignment or format of the document.
Is that possible in c# .net? Please let me know it there any tutorial available based on my requirement. Basically I am a Java developer recently moved to c#. I have googled for past 2 days, I didn't get any proper data.
Personally, I use Aspose.NET. But that component is not free. If you need something free, I can also recommend the Microsoft Open XML Library:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericwhite/archive/2008/04/22/using-the-open-xml-sdk.aspx
I would not use Office Interop as Jim suggested. It's not very stable for server.
I creating a C# application that has to create a word document.
I'm using the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word to do this and I've successfully managed to output some word documents, but creating the content trough the code is a very time consuming work.
I noted that word is able to open html pages and show it as a normal content so I created a simple test table in html and inserted it into the word document. But when I outputted the document the obvious happened: The tags where still there! Word did not format the tags as html. It just outputted exactly what I put in there.
How can I tell word to reformat the text as html?
edit: (trough the C# code of course)
edit 2: Please note that I'm parsing trough some data to make this, so I will end up with about 4 pages of the same table/html, so I will need to be able to tell word to start at the next page each time I've finished a loop. So a html-only method will probably not work.
If you're only wanting to output simple HTML content as a Word document, you could always cheat and write out the HTML content with a .doc extension.
Word will open that just fine.
If you need to add a page break, you can use a CSS page-break-before, like so:
<br style="page-break-before: always;"/>
If you're set on using Interop, having read up a little bit, this post states that you need a converter to insert HTML, and the converters are only accessible when:
you paste HTML from the Clipboard
open/insert HTML from a file
So, this answer looks like it provides a clipboard-based solution : Adding html text to Word using Interop
However, if there's any money to spend on the project, I can heartily recommend Aspose.Words which will do all of this for you.
As requested by the OP, and to make easier for others to find this solution, here it goes the answer I posted as a comment (plus extra results from testing):
When opening an HTML file, MS Word honors the CSS properties page-break-before and page-break-after. There is a caveat, however:
On "Web design" view, page-breaks are never shown (this doesn't mean that they aren't there), just like browsers don't "show" them. And Word opens html files on Web design view by default (which quite makes sense). You need to print the document or switch to some other view (typicall "Print design") to see your breaks in all their glory.
So, saving an HTML file with a .doc extension is a viable solution (also tested: Word opens it properly despite of the extension).
Note: all the testing was done on MS Word 2003 using this snippet: <html>asdf<br style="page-break-before: always;">new page!</html>
Don't build the document in code, create it in Word as template or mail merge template and the use code to merge or replace the fields data.
See this answer here
MS Word Office Automation - Filling Text Form Fields And Check Box Form Fields And Mail Merge
And See this from the mothership:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff433638.aspx
If you don't want to use an external lib, Interop is too slow for you and neither pure HTML nor mail merge template are flexible enough, you could write your content as text or HTML into one or more files (using C#), create a VBA macro in a Word document which by itself creates a second Word document, reads the content files and does any formatting you want afterwards.
You can run this macro programmatically by starting Word using the command line switch /m.
Another possible approach, if your html is xhtml (i.e. XML compliant), you could use XSLT to convert it to a Word XML format. But this would take a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time to code.
If you don't have to use HTML as the starting point you could simply build the Word XML document yourself rather than using XSLT, which would be easier. Time consuming but possible - it's something I do quite a lot in my work.
If a third party component is an option I would recommend the stuff from Aspose.
I have been pretty happy with their tools so far. The API is a little messy but everything works as one would expect.
I am planning on generating a Word document on the webserver dynamically. Is there good way of doing this in c#? I know I could script Word to do this but I would prefer another option.
I've worked at a company in the past that really wanted generated word documents, in the end they were perfectly satisfied with RTF docs that had a ".doc" extension. Word has no problem recognizing and opening them.
The RTF docs were generated with iText.net (free .net library), the API is pretty easy to use, performs extremely well, you don't need word on the machine, also, you could extend to generating PDF, HTML, and Text docs in the future with very little effort. After four years the solution I created is still in place, so that's a little testimony in iText.net's favor.
It looks like the official iText page suggests that iText Sharp is the best .Net choice right now, so that's another option
You'd be better off generating an rtf file, which word will know how to open.
If want to generate Office 2007 documents check the Open XML File Formats, they're simple zipped XML files, check this links:
Open XML File Formats: What is it, and how can I get started?
Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats
Edit: Check this project, can serve you as a good starting point:
DocumentMaker
Seems very simple and customizable, look this code snippet:
Paragraph p = new Paragraph();
p.Runs.Add(new Run("Text can have multiple format styles, they can be "));
p.Runs.Add(new Run("bold and italic",
TextFormats.Format.Bold | TextFormats.Format.Italic));
doc.Paragraphs.Add(p);
Word will quite happily open a HTML with a .doc extension. If you include an internal style sheet, you can have it fully formatted. There was previous post on this subject:
Export to Word Document in C#
Creating the old .DOC files (pre-Word 2007) is nigh-impossible without Word itself. The format is just too complex. Microsoft has released the format description, but it's enough to reduce a grown programmer to tears. There is a reason for that too (historical), but that doesn't make things better.
The new .DOCX would be easier, although quite a bit of hassle still. However depending on which Word versions you are targeting, there are some other options too.
For one, there is the classic .RTF. The format is pretty complex still, yet well documented and has strong support across many applications and platforms. And you might use some string-replacing into template files to make things easier (it's non-binary).
Then there are the "old" Word XML files. I think they worked starting with Word XP. Kinda the predecessors of .DOCX. I've used them, not bad. And the documentation is pretty OK.
Finally, the easy way that I would choose, is to make a simple HTML. Word can load HTML files just fine starting with version 2000. In the simplest way just change the extension of a HTML file to .DOC and you have it. You can also add a few word-specific tags and comments to make it look even better in Word. Use the Word's Save As...HTML option to see what they are.
There are third party libraries about that will do the job.
Doing a quick google came up with this one, for example.
I haven't tried any, so I can't give you specific advice, I'm afraid!
Let us know how you get on...
In Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a new file format called the Microsoft Open Office XML Format (.docx). This format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word. Since this is XML you can create or read with out having a Word installed.
Here is the component that generates document based on the custom template. The documents are generated from the sharepoint list ... so the data is pulled from the list item into the document on the fly:
http://store.sharemuch.com/products/generate-word-documents-from-sharepoint-list
Hope that helps,
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy
Blog: www.sharemuch.com
See title...
No.
You can use WordML (Word XML)
Word 2007 version
You can create Word 2007 documents using its XML format without the need of installing Word in your server.
This can be a starting point.
I've already +1'd Mitch's reply, but as an aside: Word isn't even supported for use in service applications; it is designed to be user-interactive. So installing Word, even if it worked, wouldn't leave you in a great place.
If you're just generating the documents from scratch the solutions so far proposed work well. My situation was that I had an existing template that I needed to use and substitute in my own text in a few places (mail merge, if you will). This was several years ago - prior to Office 2007 - but we ended up going with the Aspose library of components for this. I've used the Words and Cells (Excel) components to generate documents from templates and spreadsheets on the fly to download from web sites. The interfaces are a little clunky and can be inconsistent between the various products. The installer, frankly, is awful, but the products work pretty well and made it much easier to do what needed to be done.
Word recognizes rtf as intrinsic, and if your intended document can be constructed as whatever.rtf - which for all of its fancy formatting is plain ASCII markup - then you shd be able to write the document without Word installed.
To get the picture, create an example document and save it as an rtf file. Then view that file with an ascii text editor (like Notepad). You'll have to learn rtf syntax, but there's at least one handbook around on that.
AS
Just to add another potential solution for you, OfficeWriter is a Word/Excel API that lets you create documents and spreadsheets in ASP.NET without using Office:
http://www.officewriter.com