Rich-Text Editing of Word Documents on the Web via ASP.NET

Question

My users upload Word 2007 documents to our site and I'd like to load them into a rich edit control of some kind so the users can make modifications/ comment, etc.

What mechanisms are available to:

• load the Word document via ASP.NET, and
• parse/format/display the document in a rich editing control?

Also, what kinds of rich editing controls are best to use in this circumstance?

Answer 1

I believe that telerik's Rad Editor supports the ability to paste from word.

From the site:

Seven Ways for Pasting from Word

Telerik ASP.NET Editor offers a number of features that help the user paste formatted content from Microsoft Word and other applications, and apply different types of format stripping:

1. Strip Word-formatting on paste Strip
2. Word-formatting on paste (cleaning fonts and sizes)
3. Forced format
4. stripping on Paste Word Content in
5. Clipboard Interception Strip
6. Word-formatting after paste Paste
7. plain text Paste as HTML

Here is the demo

Answer 2

Try TEEdit. It is great for doc and docx files. Allows for save and open buttons too...

Answer 3

For display Word document, this is an intresting project using combination of Silverlight and OpenXML, worth having a look http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/TextGlow.aspx

For editing, it will be more complex. Currently there are editors out there like CKEditor, TinyMCE, but they are mainly used for editing rich text but not as natural when it comes to handling document like word that has very rich page layout and device bound are support.