Is Office 2007 PIA deployment possible without Office 2007?

Question

Does Office 2007 PIA also require Office 2007 to be installed? Can I deploy Office 2007 PIA with VSTO 3.0 (without having Office 2007 installed)?

EDIT: I have a windows application that generates MS Word files. I have added the Office 2007 PIA as custom pre-requisite in the setup, but Office 2007 PIA needs MS Office 2007 to be installed.

I just wanted to know that if VSTO does not require Office Installation, then maybe i can convert my application to VSTO.

Answer 1

What do you want to do with the Primary Interop Assemblies exactly? I think you need to clarify your question a bit.

If you plan on making any method calls to the Microsoft Office PIA DLLs without Office installed you can expect your code to blow up with a COMException when you run it since Office isn't there to inter-operate with.

Answer 2

In order to use VSTO you must have Office Installed. The VSTO PIA's only provide a shim between .NET and the COM interfaces that Office exposes. So the PIA's can do nothing w/o Office.

Answer 3

note: you can generate docx (word 2007) files without office.

Answer 4

If what you want to do is create Word documents without MS Word being installed then your best option is to use one of the available programs to do this. This is usually how Word/Excel documents are created on a web server for instance.

To generate MS Word documents we've used both Syncfusion DocIO (and XlsIO for Excel) and OfficeWriter and they have been much easier and literally 5 to 30 times faster in document generation than MS Word (depending on the complexity of the document). However, these tools are not free. I suppose it's theoretically possible to generate docx files manually (as hinted by Tracker1) but that would be a lot of work unless there are free libraries to assist in doing that.