Programming MS office with C# - is it possible?

Question

MS office apps like Excel can be programmed with Visual Basic for Applications.Is it possible to program MS office with C# for advanced tasks?

Answer 1

Yes, it is. You can use Visual Studio Tools for Office, which allows add-ins to be written in C#, VB.NET, etc. It uses COM interop to communicate with Office.

Also, nowadays you have Office apps, which are a hybrid between JavaScript and possibly a server endpoint, which can be coded in C# too.

Answer 2

Definitely. You can install Visual Studio Community 2015 for free. Then look into this folder (path may vary):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Visual Studio Tools for Office\PIA\Office15

From here you can find dll for each Office app.

Taking Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll for example, start a new C# project, add that dll into project reference.

using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;

Then you can initialize your excel app like this:

Excel.Application xlApp = new Excel.Application();
Excel.Workbook xlWorkbook = xlApp.Workbooks.Open(@"C:\path\file.xlsx");
Excel.Worksheet xlWorksheet = xlWorkbook.Sheets[1];

There is a abundance of these tutorials online. DoNotPerls is a good place to start with basic:

1. Excel
2. Word