Do I need to have MS Word installed for creating Word documents from asp.net?

Question

See title...

Answer 1

No.

You can use WordML (Word XML)

Word 2007 version

Answer 2

You can create Word 2007 documents using its XML format without the need of installing Word in your server.

This can be a starting point.

Answer 3

I've already +1'd Mitch's reply, but as an aside: Word isn't even supported for use in service applications; it is designed to be user-interactive. So installing Word, even if it worked, wouldn't leave you in a great place.

Answer 4

Word recognizes rtf as intrinsic, and if your intended document can be constructed as whatever.rtf - which for all of its fancy formatting is plain ASCII markup - then you shd be able to write the document without Word installed.

To get the picture, create an example document and save it as an rtf file. Then view that file with an ascii text editor (like Notepad). You'll have to learn rtf syntax, but there's at least one handbook around on that.

AS

Answer 5

If you're just generating the documents from scratch the solutions so far proposed work well. My situation was that I had an existing template that I needed to use and substitute in my own text in a few places (mail merge, if you will). This was several years ago - prior to Office 2007 - but we ended up going with the Aspose library of components for this. I've used the Words and Cells (Excel) components to generate documents from templates and spreadsheets on the fly to download from web sites. The interfaces are a little clunky and can be inconsistent between the various products. The installer, frankly, is awful, but the products work pretty well and made it much easier to do what needed to be done.