Office development - Word

I have a Word document [ template ] with some placeholders in it. I need to populate the placeholders with some data. I also need to generate a table at runtime. Like I can't have a table designed at design time [the number of rows and columns vary]

I see a lot of posts online. WordProcessingML, OpenXmL. Which path should I take开发者_如何学运维? Do I even have to use the template or just generate the entire doc at runtime? I am confused...

As the comments mention, the question is a bit broad, but in general, there are a few alternatives.

1) If you can deal with ONLY the newer format DOCX files, then Plutex's OpenDoPE is a good possible solution. 2) if you have to deal with older format DOC files, you may find that Word COM Automation is about the only decent solution, but that has other issues, such as speed, and the much great difficulty of using it in a server environment. 3) There are some 3'rd party Word libraries out there that let you manipulate doc files for mail merge, but most only give you barely more functionality that the default word Mail merge. WindWard reports is one solution I came very close to using at one point. It's not cheap, but it is quite powerful. Aspose is another one, though it's merge is pretty basic.