Create Office documents on server

  • Thread starter Thread starter Terry Holland
  • Start date Start date
T

Terry Holland

Not sure if this is the most appropriate group - feel free to redirect me.

If I have a web application that needs to programatically create and
manipulate office documents (word & excel), what options do I have other than
installing MS Office on the web server?

Can I just install an Office SDK or a version of Office that has no user
interface?

tia
 
This is all you need:
http://www.aspose.com/categories/product-suites/aspose.total-for-.net-and-java/default.aspx
Click to expand...

Aspose has some really nice libraries indeed, and I agree with Mark Rae
that you should very much prefer theese to Office automation.

For "pet projects", where you do not have the money need to grab an Aspose
license, you might want to consider the fact that some of the Microsoft
Office applications are able to open HTML documents. Returning an HTML
document with the mime-type set to application/msword will usually trigger
Microsoft Word to open the document. Honestly, you really do not want to
go this way unless you have to - Aspose offers much more flexibility, and
it is a lot easier to work with.
 
One limited option to process MS Word/Excel document/sheet on server side is
to use VSTO's server document capability. It does not require Word/Excel
installation on server side. Basically what you can do with serverdocument
is to embed data (retrieved in server side process) into Data island in
serverdocument. and then when the document is opened in user computer, VSTO
add-ins will do something according to the data in data island. It may or
may not suit your need.
 
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