Integrate MS Office into my web application?

Question

Hi all,

I'm researching how I can possibly implement some way of editing Word/Excel/Powerpoint files from within my web application. Basically the capability doing this online like Office 365 but within the confines of my web application.

Does Microsoft provide any sort of public api or partner program to achieve this? 

I came across something call Integrating with Office for the web but the documentation seems rather lackluster and there doesn't seem to be any recent activity on the project.

https://wopi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview.html

Any idea?

Thanks!

Answer 1

if you are thinking of running Word or Excel on the server to do some automation: don't. It's not licensed for that, and won't work properly anyway.

But Word and Excel documents are just fancy zipped xml documents, so with the right set of libraries you can create them, poke values into them, etc. I'm sure you can find some commercial libraries online.

Not sure how your question pertains to the MSFT Access database product, the topic of this forum.

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-Tom. Microsoft Access MVP

Answer 2

Thanks for the feedback.

Sorry about the forum mishap - I completely missed it!

Answer 3

I am pretty sure for whatever platform your Web application is running (ASP, PHP,JS) there are the matching libraries to work with Excel/Word...there are also various 3rd plugins that will give some functionality like Word or Excel