I recently had the need to create a Microsoft Word document from a template. I initially tried using Office Web Components and Interop but all that really wasn’t worth the trouble.  I wound up doing global replacements in the html of html   Here is how I did it:

1. Open up your template document in word, and put any target areas in special Brackets, the text would read something like “I, [FULLNAME] do hereby affirm that”.  I found that the target area had to be in uppercase, I’m not sure why
2. Go to “Save As Html, Filtered”, and save it in a writeable directory.
3. In your C# code, first load the entire document into a string
4. Convert that string into an instance of StringBuilder
5. Use the StringBuilder Replace function, it would look something like this –  sb.Replace(“[FULLNAME]“, strFullName);
6. Create a TextWriter, and write the StringBuilder to it – make sure you’re saving it with a “.doc” extension.
7. Close the TextWriter

All told, the code looks like this

//Create a new filename

string strFileName = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString();

string strPathRoot = “d:\\domains\\MyDomain\\Word\\”;

string strPath = strPathRoot + “TemplateHtml.doc”;

string str = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(strPath);

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

sb.AppendLine(s);

//replace the text

sb.Replace(“[FULLNAME]“, strFullName);

//save it out

TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(strPathRoot + strFileName + “.doc”);

// write a line of text to the file

tw.WriteLine(sb.ToString());

// close it

tw.Close();

tw.Dispose();

That’s it!

photo credit: pvera

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