Word

We have a Microsoft Word document and want to read it in a C# program. With the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word assembly, we get the contents and formatting from the document.

Getting started

In Visual Studio, please add the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word assembly to your project. Go to Project and then Add Reference.

Example

First, our file contains 3 paragraphs containing one word each. The program instantiates an Application instance and then we call Documents.Open on that variable.

using System;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        // Open a doc file.
        Application application = new Application();
        Document document = application.Documents.Open("C:\\word.doc");

        // Loop through all words in the document.
        int count = document.Words.Count;
        for (int i = 1; i <= count; i++)
        {
            // Write the word.
            string text = document.Words[i].Text;
            Console.WriteLine("Word {0} = {1}", i, text);
        }
        // Close word.
        application.Quit();
    }
}
Word 1 = One
Word 2 =
Word 3 = Two
Word 4 =
Word 5 = three
Word 6 =

Empty paragraphs

The empty paragraphs in the input file are considered words. If you have multiple words in a paragraph, they will each be separate in the Words collection.

Quit

Why is the application.Quit statement important? If you don't include this, the WINWORD.EXE application will remain in the process list.

Summary

We looked at the Microsoft.Office Interop.Word assembly and learned how to read in data from a Word document. This can be useful when you have DOC or DOCX files.