Is it possible to generate .docx files without having MS Word installed?

c# ms-word google-docs-api word-automation ole-automation
B. Clay Shannon picture B. Clay Shannon · Dec 24, 2013 · Viewed 15.1k times · Source

I want to use "OLE automation" (or whatever it's called now) to generate a Word document.

I assume that it's possible to perform the following programmatically:

Set page size (height, width, margin vals)
Set font type/name, style, and size
Add page numbering
Add pages
Insert page breaks

What I'm not sure of is if I need to have MS Word on my system to do this (to have the necessary DLLs, perhaps)? I use Open Office (I like it, and it's free), but I reckon controlling the creation of docs programmatically is probably easier/better documented for MS Word than it is for Open Office and/or Libre Office - that's why I'm strongly considering making this "rendezvous with Redmond."

This question is tangentially related to this one

If Google Docs is a possibility here, I'd be willing to have a "meeting with Mountain View" but I know nothing about that file format or whether it can be "automated" etc.

I need to end up with something that I can either convert to a PDF file or a DOCX file. Open Office can open DOCX and convert files to PDF, but I don't know about Google Docs.

Answer

Chris W picture Chris W · Dec 24, 2013

I've found https://docx.codeplex.com/ to be very useful in dynamically building docx documents.

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