Using Office 2007 PIA's against OpenOffice.Org

Question

I have been using Office 2007 PIA's to run PowerPoint files in my C# application.

I know that this requires Office 2007 to be installed on the machine.

I wanted to know, can the same set up be run with OpenOffice.org installed instead of Microsoft Office?

Note: I am using a Qindows machine.

Answer 1

In a word, No.

The PIAs contain mapping information specific to the DLL that they wrap, in your case MS Office application DLLs.

Answer 2

While OpenOffice does have an Automation Bridge which allows you to access OpenOffice applications in Automation (a proper subset of COM which in turn you can access through COM Interop), the API profile is most definitely not the same.

That being said, any code that you write which uses the Office 2007 PIAs will not be compatable with the Automation model provided by OpenOffice.

Granted, you can probably do many of the same things that you could do in Office, it's just the way you would go about doing them (the methods you call) would be completely different.