Library that takes Microsoft Office files (word/excel/ppt) and renders images of them?

Question

I'm building a webapp, and I need the ability for users to view Word/Excel/PPT files in the browser (these files are stored server-side). This is to offer them a quick way to preview the document without needing to download it and launch Microsoft Office.

Pretty much looking for the "View" feature for email attachments in GMail. I'm assuming that Google is somehow rendering the doc formats into images and displaying them in the browser.

Is there a way to do this in OpenOffice?

Answer 1

I do not know whether you can do this with OpenOffice, but SpreadsheetGear for .NET will let you open an Excel workbook and get an image from ranges of cells or charts.

You can see some examples of this here.

Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC