Opening Word (.docx) files on a Windows Form C#

Question

I'm trying to make my program have the ability to display a Microsoft Word file on a form but not having any luck in doing so. I want to be able to open the file and display it on the form as a Read-Only. So basically just display it's contents. Various users on the web have recommended displaying files in the WebBrowser control (under toolbox). I have tried this but failed to get it working. My end goal is to be able to annotate on top of the web browser (or something of similar manner) and subsequently save the annotations along with the opened file.

I'm not that experienced in the C# language too so any help on how to achieve my problem would be greatly appreciated.

Solution 1

You need a DOCX viewer control. My company recently gave away our multi-format WinForms viewer control as a free product - XtremeDocumentStudio .NET Free. It can display DOCX and is available on NuGet. It does not require a Web Browser control for embedding an online viewer or Word software installed locally. http://www.nuget.org/packages/XtremeDocumentStudio.NETFree/

Solution 2

There are some good links that might help you. First, you will find a closely related or similar question here And in that conversation someone posted the following link which is about how to build a user control for displaying Word documents in a webbrowser control.

I also found another article here about how to integrate Excel in a Windows Form application using WebBrowser. But Excel is used as an example and you may be able to adapt it to Word.