I need to make an upload tool where in the Word document will be converted to HTML format for saving to database. Any idea?
I've written one (see the Doc to HTML Converter).
To implement it, I downloaded the PIAs for Word, which let me open a document using Word, and control the format in which Word then re-saves the document.
Alternatively (instead of doing it yourself) there are tools like mine (and others, more famous) which you can use (some of which don't even use Word).
I know this is an old post, but I just wrote an app that converts a Word-doc to a usable web-page. The app provides some of the requirements in the OP.
The app is WordWebNav (WWN). It's free and open-source.
WWN provides a Word VBA program that converts Word-docs to Word-HTML.
WWN also provides a Python program that converts the Word-HTML to a usable web-page:
It adds missing features to the Word-HTML, e.g., a navigation pane.
And, WWN fixes some common bugs in Word's HTML, e.g., mis-formatted lists, and overly-wide paragraphs.
The Python program uses a CLI, and it can be called externally.
If this is a client application and you have access to Word, why not automate Word? Word can save in HTML (although you will probably have to clean the HTML up a bit). However, I will warn you that this is not very portable; whoever is going to use application will need to have the same version of Word you developed it with.
Related
The release notes of a software have some important data that I would like to extract in every release. Is there a way to extract certain information from Microsoft Word?
The application that I am thinking of would be written in C#, but I am okay if it is any other solution.
All MS Office products (Word, Office, etc.) are totally scriptable, both internally (using VBA) and externally (via OLE Automation, also known as ActiveX; in fact, VBA uses the interface exposed through OLE).
My suggestion would be to look for a library in your language that supports this. Here is a link to a Perl module, Win32::OLE, that does: as you can see, it's quite easy to use and very powerful. The interface should be similar for other languages.
I went through this a few years back. You can:
Use Word to convert the file into some other format, ASCII, RTF, XML etc.
Use some third-party app to convert to another format, such as ASCII.
Access the Word API through OLE and extract the information directly.
I couldn't find any generic libraries to read Word files, and back then all of the applications that read Word files only worked for a subset. Word changed often enough that they had trouble keeping up.
There were some documents that listed the specifics of the older Word file formats, the underlying file structure is outrageously complicated. Without a lot of resources it would be hard to keep code in sync with the file format.
Initially, I used Perl to drive Word and create new documents, but the solution was too fragile. Later I switch the whole application to work with PDFs instead, and gave up on Word.
Paul.
Probably not the most elegant solution but this seems to be the lightest method: Use a Cscript.
Just tried it on a sample word doc(2003) and it works perfectly.
More information: http://www.gregthatcher.com/Papers/VBScript/WordExtractScript.aspx
I did a lot of excel programming with the VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) tools, I think you will be able to use the VSTO API to read a word doc. You should be able to use C#
You could write an IFilter to extract text from word files. No need to have Word installed.
You can work from within Word (VBA, VSTO) or outside it.
From outside it, automation is one approach.
Another is to avoid using Word entirely. If the docs are .docx, you can use anything which can manipulate an Open XML file. Microsoft has its Open XML SDK, and in the Java world you can use docx4j or POI.
I have a need to populate a Word 2007 document from code, including repeating table sections - currently I use an XML transform on the document.xml portion of the docx, but this is extremely time consuming to setup (each time you edit the template document, you have to recreate the transform.xsl file, which can take up to a day to do for complex documents).
Is there any better way, preferably one that doesn't require you to run Word 2007 during the process?
Regards
Richard
I tried myself to write some code for that purpose, but gave up. Now I use a 3rd party product: Aspose Words and am quite happy with that component.
It doesn't need Microsoft Word on the machine.
"Aspose.Words enables .NET and Java applications to read, modify and write Word® documents without utilizing Microsoft Word®."
"Aspose.Words supports a wide array of features including document creation, content and formatting manipulation, powerful mail merge abilities, comprehensive support of DOC, OOXML, RTF, WordprocessingML, HTML, OpenDocument and PDF formats. Aspose.Words is truly the most affordable, fastest and feature rich Word component on the market."
DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with that company.
Since a DOCX file is simply a ZIP file containing a folder structure with images and XML files, you should be able to manipulate those XML files using our favorite XML manipulation API. The specification of the format is known as WordprocessingML, part of the Office Open XML standard.
I thought I'd mention it in case the 3rd party tool suggested by splattne is not an option.
Have you considered using the Open XML SDK from Microsoft? The only dependency is on .NET 3.5.
Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854%28office.14%29.aspx
Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C6E744E5-36E9-45F5-8D8C-331DF206E0D0&displaylang=en
Use invoke docx lib. it supports table data (http://invoke.co.nz/products/help/docx_tables.aspx). More info at http://invoke.co.nz/products/docx.aspx
Have you considered using VB? You could create a separate assembly to populate your document.
I know you are looking for a C# solution, but the XML literal support is one area where XML literal support could help you populate the document. Create a document in Word to server as a template, unzip the docx, paste the relevant XML section you want to change into you VB code, and add code to fill in the parts you wish to change. It's difficult to say from your description if this would meet your requirements but I would suggest looking into it.
I have been searching for several hours but i couldn't find anything about this... Basically I would like to create a template or plug-in for word 2007 that would allow someone to create new pages for a CMS. What I have in mind is something similar to blog post template. I know how to create a basic template but I can't find a way to publish the created document using a publish button inside the Word.
thnx in advance
I understand what you are trying to achieve, but Word is the wrong starting point. I would start with a much more basic text editor.
Word is horrible, horrible, horrible. Your site will define clear styles, yet Word will output nasty HTML that won't match your website's CSS definitions.
Your best bet therefore is to have a means to drop the Word file into the site, and have code programmatically analyse it and transform it into site-valid HTML. In Java you could use Apache POI, but that's very raw still. Might be a lot easier in a Microsoft centric world.
Far better, in my opinion, is to force people to learn Markdown, or BBCode, or HTML, or to use a Styled HTML Editor in your CMS - cut and paste plain text in, then style with the CMS defined styles.
As you are using Word 2007 you can export the document as XML and then use XSLT to generate the HTML.
If your CMS has an API or import facility you could convert the output from Word to suit that interface.
You can write a Word macro to add a Publish button/menu option to Word that will generate the correct output.
It's not a bad idea since it's all about the end user. If Word produces bad HTML, you should just make it semantic correct before posting it to the CMS.
I've never done this but I'm sure that it's possible to with .NET via the "Word 2007 Addin"-template (assuming Office 2007).
Good luck!
You can do what you want if you use SharePoint 2007 as your CMS. You can set up a blog on SharePoint 2007 and post to the blog from Word. If you use Office 2007 on the client end then you will get some nice buttons like "post to my blog" etc.
If you can't use SharePoint or are talking about an existing CMS, you have a lot of hurdles to jump through. This is a major undertaking and not something you can get a simple answer out of Stack Overflow.
Have you considered using one of the freely available Javascript WYSIWYG Editors such as TinyMCE http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/? When configured with all the options, it has an impressive amount of functionality and the interface is very similar to Word. I realize this doesn't directly answer your question, but as others have pointed out starting from Word is going to be difficult.
I've been on a team that wrote a Word addin for a custom CMS system. It was written in VB6 and was able to take a Word document and turn basic formatting information - lists, bold, italic and even tables into HTML, which was uploaded to the server. It didn't create new pages or manage the site in the addin though.
I would definitely avoid choosing Word as the editor for your CMS from my experience. The biggest issue is each time you want to update the addin you have to redistribute it to the company or companies using it. You can do this is as an IE active-x control but it's far easier just to handicap the user to a limited set of styling options via a Javascript editor.
Word does have a powerful API for manipulating your content with, however we needed to disable so many options in Word to avoid unwanted fonts and so on, it resembled Wordpad more than Word in the end.
If it's a greenfield project and you have the time, I would infact recommend using Silverlight 4.0 over a Javascript editor. Version 4.0 has a richtextbox control built in, plus there is also the excellent Vectorlight one.
May be it helps you, umbraco CMS allow editing with Microsoft Word.
For some reason this is a feature that Excel enjoys but not Word.
Excel can can automatically publish an HTML file version of your document when you save it.
Unfortunately Word seems to only be able to achieve this functionality when using Sharepoint, which is a shame because it can be quite useful.
What you can do, short of creating your own add-in is to add a bit of code to your template to create a HTML copy of your document whenever the user saves it.
First, make sure your template is macro-enabled (saved as .dotm file).
Second, while editing the template in Word, open the VBA code editor (ALT-F11)
In the project list double-click on your document to open its code-behind file.
Add the following bit of code to it, modifying the ActiveDocument.SaveAs path to something more appropriate to you, like a shared network folder where your CMS exposed by your CMS.
Sub FileSave()
' First Save the main document
ActiveDocument.Save
' Now we create a new document based on the current one
Selection.WholeStory
Selection.Copy
Documents.Add
Selection.PasteAndFormat wdPasteDefault
' Save it as HTML and close it
ActiveDocument.SaveAs "c:\temp\mydoc.html", fileformat:=wdFormatHTML
ActiveDocument.Close
End Sub
This will copy the original file into a blank new one that will be saved to HTML and closed before returning to the original file.
You can check some of the options to the Documents.Add if you want to use a different template than the normal one.
Security
because this template contains macros, you will have to install it with the other templates where Word expect them.
If you don't, then you'll get a security warning.
To avoid getting it, you can add the path where your templates are located to the list of Trusted Locations under Word's Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Trusted Locations.
I`d like to be able to read the content of office documents (for a custom crawler).
The office version that need to be readable are from 2000 to 2007. I mainly want to be crawling words, excel and powerpoint documents.
I don`t want to retrieve the formatting, only the text in it.
The crawler is based on lucene.NET if that can be of some help and is in c#.
I already used iTextSharp for parsing PDF
If you're already using Lucene.NET you might just want to take advantage of the various IFilters already available for doing this. Take a look at the open source SeekAFile project. It will show you how to use an IFilter to open and extract this information from any filetype where an IFilter is available. There are IFilters for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDf, and most of the other common document types.
There is an excelent open source project POI, only drawback - it is written for Java.
The .net port is somehow very beta.
Here is a good list of various tools for converting Word documents to plaintext, which you can then do whatever with.
Here's a nice little post on c-charpcorner by Krishnan LN that gives basic code to grab the text from a Word document using the Word Primary Interop assemblies.
Basically, you get the "WholeStory" property out of the Word document, paste it to the clipboard, then pull it from the clipboard while converting it to text format. The clipboard step is presumably done to strip out formatting.
For PowerPoint, you do a similar thing, but you need to loop through the slides, then for each slide loop through the shapes, and grab the "TextFrame.TextRange.Text" property in each shape.
For Excel, since Excel can be an OleDb data source, it's easiest to use ADO.NET. Here's a good post by Laurent Bugnion that walks through this technique.
You might also consider checking out DtSearch (www.DtSearch.com). Although it is primarily a searching tool, it does a great job of extracting text from a large number of file types and is considerably cheaper than other options like the Oracle/Stellent OutsideIn technology or the equivalent from Autonomy.
I've been using DtSearch for years and find it indispensible for this type of task.
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a project where I would like to generate a report export in MS Word format. The report will include images/graphs, tables, and text. What is the best way to do this? Third party tools? What are your experiences?
The answer is going to depend slightly upon if the application is running on a server or if it is running on the client machine. If you are running on a server then you are going to want to use one of the XML based office generation formats as there are know issues when using Office Automation on a server.
However, if you are working on the client machine then you have a choice of either using Office Automation or using the Office Open XML format (see links below), which is supported by Microsoft Office 2000 and up either natively or through service packs. One draw back to this though is that you might not be able to embed some kinds of graphs or images that you wish to show.
The best way to go about things will all depend sightly upon how much time you have to invest in development. If you go the route of Office Automation there are quite a few good tutorials out there that can be found via Google and is fairly simple to learn. However, the Open Office XML format is fairly new so you might find the learning curve to be a bit higher.
Office Open XML Iinformation
Office Open XML - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
OpenXML Developer - http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx
Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx
DocX free library for creating DocX documents, actively developed and very easy and intuitive to use. Since CodePlex is dying, project has moved to github.
I have spent the last week or so getting up to speed on Office Open XML. We have a database application that stores survey data that we want to report in Microsoft Word. You can actually create Word 2007 (docx) files from scratch in C#. The Open XML SDK version 2 includes a cool application called the Document Reflector that will actually provide the C# code to fully recreate a Word document. You can use parts or all of the code, and substitute the bits you want to change on the fly. The help file included with the SDK has some good code samples as well.
There is no need for the Office Interop or any other Office software on the server - the new formats are 100% XML.
Have you considered using .RTF as an alternative?
It supports embedding images and tables as well as text, opens by default using Microsoft Word and whilst it's featureset is more limited (count out any advanced formatting) for something that looks and feels and opens like a Word document it's not far off.
Your end users probably won't notice.
I have found Aspose Words to be the best as not everybody can open Office Open XML/*.docx format files and the Word interop and Word automation can be buggy. Aspose Words supports most document file types from Word 97 upwards.
It is a pay-for component but has great support. The other alternative as already suggested is RTF.
To generate Word documents with Office Automation within .NET, specifically in C# or VB.NET:
Add the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word assembly reference to your project. The path is \Visual Studio Tools for Office\PIA\Office11\Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll.
Follow the Microsoft code example
you can find here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316384/en-us.
Schmidty, if you want to generate Word documents on a web server you will need a licence for each client (not just the web server). See this section in the first link Rob posted:
"Besides the technical problems, you must also consider licensing issues. Current licensing guidelines prevent Office applications from being used on a server to service client requests, unless those clients themselves have licensed copies of Office. Using server-side Automation to provide Office functionality to unlicensed workstations is not covered by the End User License Agreement (EULA)."
If you meet the licensing requirements, I think you will need to use COM Interop - to be specific, the Office XP Primary Interop Assemblies.
Check out VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office). It is fairly simple to create a Word template, inject an xml data island into it, then send it to the client. When the user opens the doc in Word, Word reads the xml and transforms it into WordML and renders it. You will want to look at the ServerDocument class of the VSTO library. No extra licensing is required from my experience.
I have had good success using the Syncfusion Backoffice DocIO which supports doc and docx formats.
In prior releases it did not support everything in word, but accoriding to your list we tested it with tables and text as a mail merge approach and it worked fine.
Not sure about the import of images though. On their blurb page http://www.syncfusion.com/products/DocIO/Backoffice/features/default.aspx it says
Blockquote
Essential DocIO has support for inserting both Scalar and Vector images into the document, in almost all formats. Bitmap, gif, png and tiff are some of the common image types supported.
So its worth considering.
As others have mentioned you can build up a RTF document, there are some good RTF libraries around for .net like http://www.codeproject.com/KB/string/nrtftree.aspx
I faced this problem and created a small library for this. It was used in several projects and then I decided to publish it. It is free and very very simple but I'm sure it will help with you with the task. Invoke the Office Open XML Library, http://invoke.co.nz/products/docx.aspx.
I've written a blog post series on Open XML WordprocessingML document generation. 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 retrieve the content from an XML document that contains the data that drives the document generation process. The code is free, and is licensed under the the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). In that same blog post series, I also explore an approach where you write C# code in content controls. The document generation process then processes the template document and generates a C# program that generates the desired documents. One advantage of this approach is that you can use any data source as the source of data for the document generation process. That code is also licenced under the Microsoft Reciprocal License.
I currently do this exact thing.
If the document isn't very big, doesn't contain images and such, then I store it as an RTF with #MergeFields# in it and simply replace them with content, sending the result down to the user as an RTF.
For larger documents, including images and dynamically inserted images, I save the initial Word document as a Single Webpage *.mht file containing the #MergeFields# again. I then do the same as above. Using this, I can easily render a DataTable with some basic Html table tags and replace one of the #MergeFields# with a whole table.
Images can be stored on your server and the url embedded into the document too.
Interestingly, the new Office 2007 file formats are actually zip files - if you rename the extension to .zip you can open them up and see their contents. This means you should be able to switch content such as images in and out using a simple C# zip library.
#Dale Ragan: That will work for the Office 2003 XML format, but that's not portable (as, say, .doc or .docx files would be).
To read/write those, you'll need to use the Word Object Library ActiveX control:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/wordapplication.aspx
#Danny Smurf: Actually this article describes what will become the Office Open XML format which Rob answered with. I will pay more attention to the links I post for now on to make sure there not obsolete. I actually did a search on WordML, which is what it was called at the time.
I believe that the Office Open XML format is the best way to go.
LibreOffice also supports headless interaction via API. Unfortunately there's currently not much information about this feature yet.. :(
You could also use Word document generator. It can be used for client-side or server-side deployment. From the project description:
WordDocumentGenerator is an utility to generate Word documents from
templates using Visual Studio 2010 and Open XML 2.0 SDK.
WordDocumentGenerator helps generate Word documents both
non-refresh-able as well as refresh-able based on predefined templates
using minimum code changes. Content controls are used as placeholders
for document generation. 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
Another alternative is Windward Docgen (disclaimer - I'm the founder). With Windward you design the template in Word, including images, tables, graphs, gauges, and anything else you want. You can set tags where data from an XML or SQL datasource is inserted (including functionality like forEach loops, import, etc). And then generate the report to DOCX, PDF, HTML, etc.