How to extract text from MS office documents in C#

Question

I was trying to extract a text(string) from MS Word (.doc, .docx), Excel and Powerpoint using C#. Where can i find a free and simple .Net library to read MS Office documents? I tried to use NPOI but i didn't get a sample about how to use NPOI.

Answer 1

For Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Word 2010 (.docx) files you can use the Open XML SDK. This snippet of code will open a document and return its contents as text. It is especially useful for anyone trying to use regular expressions to parse the contents of a Word document. To use this solution you would need reference DocumentFormat.OpenXml.dll, which is part of the OpenXML SDK.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854.aspx

 public static string TextFromWord(SPFile file)
    {
        const string wordmlNamespace = "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main";

        StringBuilder textBuilder = new StringBuilder();
        using (WordprocessingDocument wdDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(file.OpenBinaryStream(), false))
        {
            // Manage namespaces to perform XPath queries.  
            NameTable nt = new NameTable();
            XmlNamespaceManager nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(nt);
            nsManager.AddNamespace("w", wordmlNamespace);

            // Get the document part from the package.  
            // Load the XML in the document part into an XmlDocument instance.  
            XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument(nt);
            xdoc.Load(wdDoc.MainDocumentPart.GetStream());

            XmlNodeList paragraphNodes = xdoc.SelectNodes("//w:p", nsManager);
            foreach (XmlNode paragraphNode in paragraphNodes)
            {
                XmlNodeList textNodes = paragraphNode.SelectNodes(".//w:t", nsManager);
                foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode textNode in textNodes)
                {
                    textBuilder.Append(textNode.InnerText);
                }
                textBuilder.Append(Environment.NewLine);
            }

        }
        return textBuilder.ToString();
    }