How do I display office and/or pdf content on a windows form?

Question

We have an application in which admin members can add content for their subordinates to view. Their requirement is that it should be able to display Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents in a non-editable manner.

The one option that I found for doing this is to have the content loaded into a web browser component. The downside to that is that it prompts the user to open/save/cancel. We are concerned that the subordinates, being mostly computer illiterate, will have trouble opening the documents in this manner.

Using the above method also means that Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat (or another IE enabled PDF viewer) need to be installed on all the machines that will be running the application, which implies expensive licensing fees.

Is there a better way to get this content to display on my forms in C#?

Answer 1

Possibly interesting as well:

Save the documents to XPS using Microsoft Office 2007 (or print them to an XPS printer).

You can display the read-only XPS document either using the XPS viewer component or render page by page into a PNG or JPEG image. This rendering can be achieved quite easily using .NET 3.5 / WPF.

XpsDocument xpsDoc = new XpsDocument(xpsFileName, System.IO.FileAccess.Read);

FixedDocumentSequence docSeq = xpsDoc.GetFixedDocumentSequence();
const double scaleFactor = 0.8;
for (int pageNum = 0; pageNum < docSeq.DocumentPaginator.PageCount; pageNum++)
{
    DocumentPage docPage = docSeq.DocumentPaginator.GetPage(pageNum);

    // FIX: calling GetPage without calling UpdateLayout causes a memory leak
    ((FixedPage)docPage.Visual).UpdateLayout();

    RenderTargetBitmap renderTarget = new RenderTargetBitmap((int)Math.Round(scaleFactor * docPage.Size.Width),
                (int)Math.Round(scaleFactor * docPage.Size.Height), (int)Math.Round(scaleFactor * 96), (int)Math.Round(scaleFactor * 96), PixelFormats.Default);
    renderTarget.Render(docPage.Visual);

    JpegBitmapEncoder encoder = new JpegBitmapEncoder();
    encoder.QualityLevel = 75;
    // Choose type here ie: JpegBitmapEncoder, etc
    //BitmapEncoder encoder = new PngBitmapEncoder();  // Choose type here ie: JpegBitmapEncoder, etc
    encoder.Frames.Add(BitmapFrame.Create(renderTarget));

    string pageImageFileName = string.Format("{0}-{1}.jpg", Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(xpsFileName), Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(xpsFileName)), pageNum);
            using (FileStream pageOutStream = new FileStream(pageImageFileName, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write))
    {
        encoder.Save(pageOutStream);
    }
}

This code needs references to the PresentationCore, PresentationFramework and ReachFramework assemblies.

EDIT: The code above contained a memory leak (see Opening XPS document in .Net causes a memory leak). The workaround has been been inserted in the example.

Answer 2

SpreadsheetGear for .NET has an Excel Compatible Windows Forms control which will display your Excel workbooks (it will do lot more than that if you want it to). You can see what people say and download the free trial if you want to give it a try.

SpreasheetGear can also create images from charts and ranges of cells if you need to generate images to display in a web page.