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Easiest way to create dynamic-content documents (like invoices, delivery notes)

I was searching the web with a few results, but none of them seems to fit the task. I was looking für possibilites for .NET, but would also like to know how Java/PHP/etc. developers finish tasks like this.
As far as I found out, I have the option to:
Use MigraDoc/PDFSharp and go the "code" way, without any visual designer
I could use HTML and convert it to a PDF (which is the best approach in theory, but practically it's awful to get good looking HTML 1:1 into a PDF file)
I could use some weird MS Word templateing/batch stuff
LaTeX?
What are your solutions?

We use SoftArtisans OfficeWriter

A solution that we settled on in a previous project was XSL-FO. Although it did not have a visual designer, we found it to be very developer friendly and more suitable to run in a server type environment. It also deals with document "flow" a lot better than most of the reporting software that offer a designer. I do know that we had a lot of trouble with Crystal Reports around deployment, COM exceptions being thrown and limitations on how many reports can be generated concurrently. One downside to using XSL-FO is all the syntactic sugar that comes with XML.
This question lists a few XSL-FO engines.

Regarding your "3.) weird MS Word templateing/batch stuff":
I love to use Aspose.Words, a commercial package to create/edit/export Microsoft Office Word documents, without any Office components being installed.
Aspose.Words is capable of doing Mail Merge stuff and write PDF files, so I often start on my desktop computer with a DOC that I edit in Word and use this with Aspose.Words on my server to produce PDFs.

One method I've used before for Windows desktop applications is to use XAML/WPF. The nice thing about this solution is that there are a lot of good tools and documentation around building layouts with XAML. Then you just pass the canvas to a PrintDialog and you're done. If you've been doing a lot with WPF/XAML already this is a very easy solution and I've had a lot of success with it. I learned most of what I needed to get started here: http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/printing-in-wpf
The downside, of course, is your dependency then on .NET and WPF.

Similar to Matt Fs solution of using Crystal Reports, I use SQL Server Reporting Services. You can create add a rdlc file to your solution and use the WYSIWYG editor to design your report. Then in your code, all you have to do it assign your data source to your report in code and it should work. This even supports exporting to PDF.

Seems as no-one has mentioned Latex-based solutions, there was a stack overflow Tex question answered by jason. Short version: uses MikTex, beautiful documents, big hassle to use build/maintain.

Thanks for all your answers...
I finally decided to implement my own solution using Visual Studio 2010 and the Office-Tools... This is not the "perfect" solution, but it was easy & fast to implement, while i still have the flexibility to change the documents witch excel or word...
Downside of course: You need Office installed.

It depends on how you get your template documents. For example, if you have others in your organization responsible for generating the "standard" invoice document, you'll probably have a solution that involves mail merges in the Microsoft Word API, because you need to work with Word-formatted input files. Alternately, if you are merely given the specs for the appearance of the document ("Logo in the top-right, 5 inches down, then a horizontal line two inches below that, then... etc.") You could do it entirely in code. Even if you're designing a solution from scratch, take into account who your document suppliers WILL be, and plan accordingly. Finally, if this is from-scratch for a small set of documents that won't change much (i.e., you're starting your own software company and want to send invoices) don't do it. Just buy something off the shelf or use Word :)

We use xaml FixedPage, can use a designer like Kazaml, it has a lot of layout flexablity, and databinding works great with dynamic objects like expando. In code we bind a datacontext and then render that to XPS, since we need the final output to be pdf we use GhostXPS which is free but has to be executed in a separate processs, there are third party fully managed converters for xps to pdf though.

We use Crystal Reports which comes free with Visual Studio. You can easily create a report/document that is bound to a database or unbound.
For example you could suppress the header and footer, expand the details section to be approx. A4 size, then add either bound fields or use parameters for unbound content. Then at runtime for bound documents set the selection formula to only pull in data for one transaction or for unbound documents just pass in the parameters.
A nice feature of Crystal Reports is there are export features, so export to PDF, Word, etc. Also it's easy to auto print to a specified printer.

Crystal reports can be a pain! On a basic level the outsourced developers for our in house software for Works Order, Invoices etc we use Dev Express although I think it can be pricey.
For reports being generated by the software I ended up choosing to have exports into a raw CSV which of course can be opened up by any spreadsheet software

Give users the ability to edit Word 97-2010 documents within a .NET application

I was wondering if anyone has any idea of any product/method to give my end users the ability to edit Word documents within our C#/.NET application, avoiding the use of Automation and separate instances of Word opening outside of the application. This is a possibility [backup plan!] - but one that I'd rather not have to implement (due to the amount of work involved and having users exit our application).
I know that I could possibly use the WebBrowser control - but from what I've been able to find -- support for this is sketchy at best, and things such as toolbars are not present, and it does not appear to work with Word 2010 anyway.
I've been evaluating a few products that claim to do this but many are lacking in features or produce compatibility errors within documents rendering them useless when opened in Word.
We are using Word 2003 and Word 2010. Our documents start out as .DOCX files through our custom merge/templating processes.
Any suggestions for products or other ideas would be great.
Edit:
We're creating documents without issue using OpenXML. Fun stuff, works really well. However, at the end of the day I would prefer to have users editing the created documents as well as legacy documents (created as .DOC files) within our .NET application directly. Unforunately, with Microsoft removing the ability to embed via ActiveX/OLE, etc. there isn't a way to do this. What I am looking for is a 3rd party product to achieve this, which should be virtually 100% compatible with both the .DOC and .DOCX formats.
For those asking why ? Security, ease of use, etc. We are storing documents in a database. Once I start dropping files on the filesystem and working with Automation support/macros, ... there's a lot of things that would have to be done to get the files back into the database / update, etc. This is made especially difficult since Word doesn't expose the raw bytes[] of a document and files must be saved as temporary files somewhere on the fs. Just a lot of headaches.
So, the "easiest" solution - embed Word [seems not possible] or use a 3rd party product that supports editing .DOC/.DOCX files.
An example is DevExpress XtraRichEdit control - unfortunately, while it supports a lot of nice Word-like/compatible features it only works with .DOCX files.. and isn't 100% feature complete, compared to Word.

The file structure of a word document is huge, it could take hundreds of man hours to program even limited .doc/docx support. What exactly is the reason for using your program to edit a word file over word itself?
I am not exactly sure how Word 2003 has .docx support though, my understanding is there was only a word viewer release when Office 2007 was released, it of course has been years since thats been a problem.
If you are going to actually do this only add support for .doc files since there is more information out there, you can allow word itself to handle the converstion to a .docx file if you want.

You are not going to find a third party product that does this. The amount of effort required to build an app that 100% supports the Word formats is beyond consideration. Not just every feature, but every bug as well would have to be duplicated. Considering the potential legal pitfalls of doing such, no one in their right mind would bother trying. The legal aspects, incidentally, is one of the primary reasons for the new formats.
Which means you have to go external. There are two really good options here.
One would be to hook into Office Live to give them the ability to edit Microsoft Documents online.
Another possibility is to just leverage Sharepoint in your application. It has built in methods for document workflow and integrates nicely with Office.
A third possibility would be to write your own word add-in which would take care of saving / loading the documents from your system. I'd go with the first two above before going this route.

This used to be supported through a feature called OLE Embedding. Support for it has been disappearing from Microsoft software and tools over the past 10 years. Notably .NET has no support for it whatsoever. Office was one of the last hold-outs with 2007 already getting pretty cranky about it. But this indeed looks to be completely gonzo in the 2010 edition. All download links to the DSOFramer control, a generic ActiveX embedding control were removed around the time that 2010 went into beta.
There's no future here, look at VSTO for the road ahead.

Word Automation Services and Office Web Apps (requires SP 2010).

Certainly not 100% coverage of Word features, but have you tried ASPOSE.Words.NET Total or TXTextControl.NET?

Generating a Word Document with C#

Given a list of mailing addresses, I need to open an existing Word document, which is formatted for printing labels, and then insert each address into a different cell of the table. The current solution opens the Word application and moves the cursor to insert the text. However, after reading about the security issues and problems associated with opening the newer versions of Word from a web application, I have decided that I need to use another method.
I have looked into using Office Open XML, but I have not found any good resources that provide concrete information on exactly how to use it. Also, someone suggested that I use SQL reporting services, but searching for information on how to use them, lead me nowhere.
Which method do you think is the most appropriate for my problem?
Code samples and links to good tutorials would be extremely helpful.

Thanks for all the answers, but I really did not want to pay for a plugin and using Word automation was out of the question. So I kept searching and eventually, through some trial and error, found some answers.
After throughly searching through Microsoft's site, I found some newer articles on the Office Open XML SDK. I downloaded the new tools and just started going through each them.
I then found the Document Reflector, which creates a class to generate XML code based off an existing Word Document (.docx). Using my Label Template Document and the code this tool generated, I went through and added a loop that appends table cells for each address. It actually proved to be fairly simple and way faster than using Word automation.
So, if you're still using Word automation check out the Office Open XML tools. Their surprisingly extensive for a free download from Microsoft.
Office Open XML SDK 2.0 Download

I use the Words plugin from Aspose.com to do mail merges (programming guide).

You can take a look show 137 and 138 on dnrTV (www.dnrtv.com). In these video's Beth Massi shows how to do some editing and mail merging with OpenXML. She does this by using the Open XML SDK and xml literals in VB. It requires no third party components. Also it doesn't require MS Office to be installed on the machine.
This video inspired me as a C# developed (and no VB experience) to do some XML manipulation in a separate dll in VB. I call into this dll from my C# application.
It is worth a try.

We have the product Aspose that tvanfosson has mentioned. The edition that we purchased works with SQL Reporting Services so it can be used with the scheduler for creating output. It is really a great product and we used in a system that needed to support Korean characters in the final document. It works great and was under $1K with support. Not bad.
The advantage of using a product like this is that you can continue to manage your data and the skill set required to produce the documents is at a level where a variety of developers can support its use.

Vanstee,
If you really want to do this in code, check out this post I just found on Google
http://kellychronicles.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A0D71E1614E8DBF8!1364.entry

If you are using reporting services cant you just move the information in the word doc into a database table and read it from there, taking word out of the equation?

Parsing Office Documents

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.

How can a Word document be created in C#? [closed]

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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.