Question about Ms Word

Question

Hey Guys I am trying to develop an application where people can open and edit word documents and RichTextFiles. I am using RichTextBox for editing.. but I am unable to figure out how to open Word Documents. I figured I need to add some COM library by searching through some forums.. But I want to this program to function perfectly no matter if the user has MS office installed on his computer or not.. The document should be opened in the textbox not with the MS WORD application.. I hope you understand my problem..please help me thanks

avidgamefan · Answer

If you have to program the read itself it would be complicated. RTF files are much simpler but I'm not sure how much work would be involved to build a reader. (I did a small hack once to write in RTF format just a sub-set of the available keys and it was pretty straightforward. It's very similar to HTML in how it's structured.) Since you want to display the plain text in a text box you don't necessarily have to recognize and deal with all of the elements in the file just know enough of the format to skip past unnecessary items and read in the text blocks. That would be my take on it if you had to roll-your-own. Of course it would be easier to find a library that did the read for you. Happy searching! :-) If Word was on their machine you probably could use COM to communicate with Word but it sounds like that isn't an option for you. Gary

madinewala · Answer

Hi you could use Process.start(Winword.exe) to open MS Word. Also you'll have to check if word is installed on your users' PC. If not then you could open a notepad Process.Start(Notepad.exe) else open Word Thanks irfan