Join MS Word documents

Question

What is the recommended strategy for in code to splice a set of MS Word documents together into one?

Cheers

Nik

Answer 1

If you are using Open XML (ie docx), there are 2 basic approaches to solving this problem:

The first is to do what is necessary so ids point to the correct relationship (eg for images, hyperlinks), and styles are defined etc. A good explanation of what you need to do can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive/2009/02/05/move-insert-delete-paragraphs-in-word-processing-documents-using-the-open-xml-sdk.aspx

PowerTools implements that.

The second is to use altChunk: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive/2008/10/27/how-to-use-altchunk-for-document-assembly.aspx

Answer 2

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/AppendWordDocuments.aspx

Or any of these: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=append+microsoft+word+documents

Answer 3

Go look at the various SDKs available. This is much easier to do if you are using Word 2007, as the file is actually a zip file containing various XML documents. MS even has an SDK called "Open XML Format SDK 1.0" which provides strongly typed classes for working with the new office format.