I’m sure there are many of you that have been approached at some point to automate word, excel etc… and come across VBA.
Now VBA has been around since 1993 and is by all accounts a pretty ugly machine to work. With VSTA now available it has slightly improved the scene but still renders a lot of day to day tasks rather cumbersome.
That’s why myself , and a lot of people use Interop.
Interop is a blessing for coders, It allows us to use .Net code with other compatible COM libraries and most modern popular applications have their own.
Now for this example I will be using VS2008 and Office 2007 but either version of Visual studio or Office will be roughly the same.
Though i expect if you know how to use visual studio you will most likely know all of the above anyway..
The first thing we need to do is create a new project. It wants to be a C#(i will post the vb source) Project Just like the one here.
The next step is to locate where the references are stored. Using your solution explorer, expand the solution file until you come across ‘References’ and the click ‘Add Reference’ just like here
The dialog box you now have in front of you lists all the .Net libraries you can access along with the regular COM libraries too. For this project we can use a .Net library, scroll down until you find one entitled ‘Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word’ you may have more than one version, in this case i will be using version 12.0.0.0 though this will not matter too much for our program. your screen should look like this. Click ok and you will notice that a new reference appears for ‘Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word‘.
We now need to add a button and a file dialog to our form, I’m going to call the button btnClick and the file dialog FDWordDocument.
Double click on the button(btnClick) to assign it an event in our code behind.
The initial setup of our project is now complete.
Now we have added references to the Office Interop libraries, we need to use them.
The structure of Interop works in a rather unusual way. We cannot access directly Streams from the methods/objects, this makes in an imperfect solution, though it makes life far easier then the alternatives.
Below is a basic structure of how we open a document using c#
using Word = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word; // Set up the namespace Word
Initialize the program.. i.e. Main or in a winforms app simply let visual studio do that for you.
protected void ProcessFile(string Filename)
{
object missing = Type.Missing; // create an object that we will later use to reference a missing type
object Filename = Filename; // create an object that we will later use to reference to our file.
Word.Application appWord = new Word.ApplicationClass(); // Create a new word application, this actually creates an instance of microsoft word.
appWord.Documents.Open(ref Filename, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing,ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); // using our new word application, open up the document that we referenced above.
/*Perform our operation here, i.e. find and replace, add/remove links, search for specific data or even amend styling*/
}
Thats essentially it, i will probably update this post in the future with