how to use microsoft excel 2007 productively

If all you care about is simple hosting, this approach might work for you. The simplest approach to hosting an Office application inside a managed application involves hosting the Windows Forms WebBrowser control and pointing it at an Office document. There are a couple of Active Document Containers readily available on most Windows machines:

This container implements a number of COM interfaces above and beyond those found in a simple ActiveX host. The host must be anĪctive Document Container. An Office application, like Excel, has much larger requirements for its host container. Well, unfortunately it’s not that easy when it comes to hosting Office. So if you can find a simple ActiveX wrapper for your Office application, then you’re all set, right? There are code samples in the SDK that demonstrate how to host an ActiveX control inside your WPF application. If you go down the path of hosting an Office app, you should expect some technical challengesĪnd a potential steep learning curve, especially if you’re considering office automation. Hosted Office applications come with a whole set of their own challenges (keeping the document focused, keeping application menus in sync with document menus, etc).

In the latter article, special attention should be given to the sections entitled “Notable differences in output behavior” and “Notable differences in input behavior”. WPF Interoperation: ”Airspace” and Window Regions Overview and Most of these are documented in the SDK in topics like Scenario!) when hosting any Win32-based window (a.k.a., an HWND) within a WPF app. So yes, it’s possible to host an Office application, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy! There are definitely a lot of caveats, disclaimers, qualifiers, stipulations, and limitations (yep, even the thesaurus works in the hosted You will need to install the DSO Framer control prior to running the sample. The Visio host crashed more often than not. It should host Project documents also, but I don’t have Project, so I couldn’t verify this.Īnd I should note that hosting Visio 2007 documents proved to be very flaky. This sample will work for hosting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio documents. And just to prove it, I’m writing this entire post inside of Microsoft Word while it’s being hosted inside my WPF application.įree to download the code for this sample. It’s certainly possible to host a Microsoft Office application inside of a WPF application.

How to use microsoft excel 2007 productively