Primary Interop Assemblies for Microsoft Office Applications

Question

I'm trying to install Interop Assemblies for Microsoft Office on my web servers, for the use of reading word documents from my site.

Can I install just the Assemblies? Or the only way is installing an office suite?

The exception :

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

List of Interop Assemblies: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/15s06t57.aspx#pialist

Answer 1

You need to install the full version of Microsoft Office if you desire to use the functionality. The interop assemblies within themselves do not provide any functionality, rather, these in turn invoke the functions from Microsoft Office itself. Hence you will need to install Office on the web server.

As an alternative, you could use the Office Sharepoint Server, which allows web users to generate MS Office document content.

Answer 2

You need to install a DLL for Interop assemblies for various versions. Most of them are available on Visual Studio DLL Assembly repository.