Give users the ability to edit Word 97-2010 documents within a .NET application

I was wondering if anyone has any idea of any product/method to give my end users the ability to edit Word documents within our C#/.NET application, avoiding the use of Automation and separate instances of Word opening outside of the application. This is a possibility [backup plan!] - but one that I'd rather not have to implement (due to the amount of work involved and having users exit our application).

I know that I could possibly use the WebBrowser control - but from what I've been able to find -- support for this is sketchy at best, and things such as toolbars are not present, and it does not appear to work with Word 2010 anyway.

I've been evaluating a few products that claim to do this but many are lacking in features or produce compatibility errors within documents rendering them useless when opened in Word.

We are using Word 2003 and Word 2010. Our documents start out as .DOCX files through our custom merge/templating processes.

Any suggestions for products or other ideas would be great.

• Edit: We're creating documents without issue using OpenXML. Fun stuff, works really well. However, at the end of the day I would prefer to have users editing the created documents as well as legacy documents (开发者_开发知识库created as .DOC files) within our .NET application directly. Unforunately, with Microsoft removing the ability to embed via ActiveX/OLE, etc. there isn't a way to do this. What I am looking for is a 3rd party product to achieve this, which should be virtually 100% compatible with both the .DOC and .DOCX formats.

For those asking why ? Security, ease of use, etc. We are storing documents in a database. Once I start dropping files on the filesystem and working with Automation support/macros, ... there's a lot of things that would have to be done to get the files back into the database / update, etc. This is made especially difficult since Word doesn't expose the raw bytes[] of a document and files must be saved as temporary files somewhere on the fs. Just a lot of headaches.

So, the "easiest" solution - embed Word [seems not possible] or use a 3rd party product that supports editing .DOC/.DOCX files.

An example is DevExpress XtraRichEdit control - unfortunately, while it supports a lot of nice Word-like/compatible features it only works with .DOCX files.. and isn't 100% feature complete, compared to Word.

The file structure of a word document is huge, it could take hundreds of man hours to program even limited .doc/docx support. What exactly is the reason for using your program to edit a word file over word itself?

I am not exactly sure how Word 2003 has .docx support though, my understanding is there was only a word viewer release when Office 2007 was released, it of course has been years since thats been a problem.

If you are going to actually do this only add support for .doc files since there is more information out there, you can allow word itself to handle the converstion to a .docx file if you want.

You are not going to find a third party product that does this. The amount of effort required to build an app that 100% supports the Word formats is beyond consideration. Not just every feature, but every bug as well would have to be duplicated. Considering the potential legal pitfalls of doing such, no one in their right mind would bother trying. The legal aspects, incidentally, is one of the primary reasons for the new formats.

Which means you have to go external. There are two really good options here.

One would be to hook into Office Live to give them the ability to edit Microsoft Documents online.

Another possibility is to just leverage Sharepoint in your application. It has built in methods for document workflow and integrates nicely with Office.

A third possibility would be to write your own word add-in which would take care of saving / loading the documents from your system. I'd go with the first two above before going this route.

This used to be supported through a feature called OLE Embedding. Support for it has been disappearing from Microsoft software and tools over the past 10 years. Notably .NET has no support for it whatsoever. Office was one of the last hold-outs with 2007 already getting pretty cranky about it. But this indeed looks to be completely gonzo in the 2010 edition. All download links to the DSOFramer control, a generic ActiveX embedding control were removed around the time that 2010 went into beta.

There's no future here, look at VSTO for the road ahead.

Word Automation Services and Office Web Apps (requires SP 2010).

Certainly not 100% coverage of Word features, but have you tried ASPOSE.Words.NET Total or TXTextControl.NET?