Word Automation Compatability

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Guest

I have a reference to Microsoft Word 10.0 Object Library in a vb.net 1.0
project. The application creates a mail merge.

I am testing with Word 2002, and everything is working correctly.

I want to know which versions of Word I should expect this application to be
compatable with.

Is the Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library available as a download? If so,
would I need it to make my application compatable with Word 2007?

What would the earliest compatable version of Word be, using either of these
Object Libraries?
 
Is the Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library available as a download? If so,
would I need it to make my application compatable with Word 2007?
Click to expand...

AFAIK the only way to get the 12.0 Object Library is to buy Word 2007.
When you deploy the application it should create the interop dll that
will or won't work depending on how you release the application. I
noticed that Click-Once deployment will check to see if the installer
has Word 2007 installed and if so will allow the application to run.
If the user does not have, or has an earlier version of Word, the
installation will fail. However, if you use XCopy deployment, earlier
versions of Word will work fine with the newer dll, but obviously the
setup will fail if the user does not have Word installed. I don't know
what new features the 12.0 library contains, but certainly you'd have
to avoid using them for backwards compatibility.

With older dlls running on newer versions of Word I don't know of any
problems - I believe they should work fine. I have an application that
does Excel interop with the 11.0 Object Library that I have never had
problems with on my Office 2007 box.

Overall, if you want to make absolutely sure you can generate the
files no matter what version (if any) of Word the client has, you
probably need to do it on a machine you control. What I would envision
would be to have a WebService that would generate the Word documents
and then stream them to the clients. Then you would only need to worry
about the client having an internet connection so they could consume
the service. It would no longer matter if they used Word 97, 2007 or
even Open Office.Org since they creation layer would be completely
encapsulated.

Thanks,

Seth Rowe
 
Charlie,

This is not my sport, however be aware that Visual Studio 2005 has a part
which is called visual studio for applications, that should do it in my idea
for all versions.

The old way with the objects is forever depended on the word version and has
forever been a trouble area.

However, sorry this is not the part I like therefore what I write is not
based on knowledge, I had the same trouble as you with all those versions,
and I am glad that it is at the moment not my problem. (Probably it will be
soon)

:-)

Cor
 
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