At the moment we're using office interop to generate documents from templates in office 2003 (word, excel & powerpoint). This seems to be rather frowned upon (see office-interop-with-64bit-windows-in-asp-net) and whilst it works fine I would be happier with a supported solution.
What non hacky method is there to do this? Requirements are
- Office 2003 only. (No office xml / office 2007 compatability pack allowed)
- Must run server side from ASP.NET
- Must be able to create Word, Excel & Powerpoint documents from user supplied .dot, .xlt and .pot templates
- Must be able to further customise the docouments by replacing certain text at certain points e.g. names, addresses etc
- Free or very low cost. I'm not going to be able to raise a purchase order to replace a working system on the grounds that four people on some website thought it was a dirty hack 😉
I'm not sure there is a better way. Is there?
Best Answer
I just posted this as an answer to another question about automating Office, but I think it's a suitable response to this question too (especially since you are looking for a free or low cost solution).
I've had no end of problems (poor performance, hanging processes, crashing processes etc) using Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint through interop in a web service to print Office documents to PDF format. I too have faced problems that I suspect are because of invisible dialog boxes (maybe a file is corrupt, read-only recommended has been set, file is password protected, or whatever).
I know there are tools available that don't use Office, but they are very expensive. My solution was to switch to automating OpenOffice. OpenOffice seems to be much more stable, and I've left hanging processes and the like behind.
So, while I suppose I am saying "don't automate Microsoft Office", I'm not suggesting that you abandon automation altogether; just that I've had much more success automating OpenOffice than Microsoft Office.