C#: Create and Manipulate Word Documents Programmatically Using DocX

The big pain point in working with MS Word documents programmatically is . . . the Office Interop. To get almost anything done with Word (including simply pulling the text out of the document, you pretty much need to use Interop, which also means you have to have Word installed on the local machine which is consuming your application. Additionally, my understanding is that there are issues with doing Word automation on the server side.

Often times though, we don't so much need to automate the office application directly so much as get at the contents of Office file (such as Word or Excel files). Dealing with all that Interop nastiness makes this more painful than it needs to be.

Thankfully, the open source DocX library by Cathal Coffey solves both problems nicely, and unlike Interop, presents an easy-to-use, highly discoverable API for performing myriad manipulations/extractions against the Word document format (the .docx format, introduced as of Word 2007).

C#: Create and Manipulate Word Documents Programmatically Using DocX