Document Assembly: Merging Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Content Together

Document assembly seems to be a hot topic these days especially when combined with the power of SharePoint. Today, I want to show you a pretty rich document assembly solution that is able to take multiple Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and merge them all together to form a final Word document. I showed this solution at both PDC and SPC, so I am going to take the opportunity in this blog to discuss some of the details around the solution.

If you want to jump straight into the code, feel free to download the solution here.

Scenario

Imagine a scenario where I work for a company that analyzes stocks and generates reports for every company/stock analyzed. These reports are typically quite rich and usually involve more than one person contributing to the content. Content is separated out into multiple Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents where each document is assigned to an individual. Once all the content has been written, the content is all assembled into a final report as a Word document. My company has asked me to write a solution that will be able to merge all these documents programmatically.

Solution

Before I get into the details of my solution, I want to talk about a brand new feature of SharePoint 2010, called Document Sets, which I will leverage to help solve this problem. Document Sets gives users a new way to manage a collection of documents as a single object. Think of this feature as allowing for a binder of related content.

In the case of this solution, I have defined a custom Document Set as having a set of files (six in my case) that correspond to the various components of the final analysis report. Here is a screenshot of a Document Set for a company called Contoso:

Using Document Sets and given the scenario I talked about above we will need to take the following actions:

1. Create a set of documents that represent the Document Set for my solution. One of the documents will be a Word template that represents the look and feel of the final report
2. Create and add a custom Document Set to a SharePoint library
3. Create a web part for the SharePoint library that has a button labeled "Assemble Documents", which will be used to merge all the content together into a final document. This web part will be added to the Document Set library
4. Using the Open XML SDK, open the template document from the Document Set and look for all content controls
5. For every content control found, find the corresponding document content in the library and merge that content into the final document
6. Once the document assembly is complete, offer the user the ability to open or save the report

Step 1 – Creating the Right Template

Setting up the right template makes all the difference when creating Office document solutions. In the case of my solution I have a Document Set with six files, where one of the files is my template file. All these documents are empty except for the template document. As in many of my previous posts, the template document represents the final look of the final report. I will leverage content controls within my template to specify semantic regions within my document to be used to merge content together. The title of my content controls will represent the type of content to be merged. For example, a Word document, a chart from a spreadsheet, a table from a spreadsheet, or a SmartArt graphic from a presentation. The content of my content control will represent the name of the file that contains the content to be merged. For example, here is a screenshot of my template document highlighting one of my content controls labeled "Word:Document" with content set to "Introduction":

This content control will represent the region where I will merge the Introduction Word document into my template file. For sake of completeness the other content controls are labeled "Spreadsheet:Chart", "Spreadsheet:Table", and "Presentation:SmartArt".

You can find the files that represent my Document Set here.

Step 2 – Setting Up Document Sets in SharePoint 2010

Perform the following steps to enable Document Sets on your SharePoint 2010 site:

1. Site Actions | Site Settings (top level site settings)
2. Site Collections Administration | Site collection features
3. Activate Document Sets feature, if not already activated
4. Go to the Document Library where you want to add the Document Sets feature
5. Site Actions | Site Settings
6. Galleries | Site content types
7. Create
8. Set "Select parent content type from:" to "Document Set Content Types"
9. Specify a name and click OK
10. In the Site Content Types list click on the link to the created Document Set
11. Document Set settings
12. Specify the default content (in my case I added six documents to the set) and click OK
13. Go to the Document Library where you want to add the Document Sets feature
14. Library Tools | Library | Library Settings
15. Advanced Settings
16. Choose "Yes" for "Allow management of content types?" and click OK
17. Content Types | Add from existing site content types
18. Add your custom content type for the Document Set

At this point you should have a library set up with a Document Set content type.

Step 3 – Create a Web Part with an Assemble Documents Command

In order to make this solution usable, we need to add a command within our document library that allows users to merge documents together. The easiest way to accomplish this task is to create a Web Part within Visual Studio 2010. Once you've created the Web Part modify the CreateChildControls

method as follows:

This method will add a new button control where we can add our logic to merge the documents contained within a given Document Set (the merge code will be called from void btnSubmit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e).

Once we've created this web part, the next step is to add the button to our Document Set. The easiest way to accomplish this task is to use SharePoint Designer 2010. Perform the following steps to add your custom web part to the Document Set library:

1. Open your SharePoint site within SharePoint Designer 2010
2. Navigate to your document library that contains the Document Set
3. All Files | Custom document library name | Forms | Document Set name | XXXXhomepage.aspx
4. Click on the bottom of WebPartZone_CenterMain
5. Insert | Web Part | select your custom web part created from Visual Studio
6. Save and Close

At this point you should see an "Assemble Documents" command show up for any created Document Set:

Step 4 – Finding the Content Controls

Finding content controls within a document involves the following steps:

1. Open template document from the SharePoint site
2. Load document into memory
3. Open document (from memory) with the Open XML SDK
4. Loop through all content controls within the document
5. For every content control figure out the title
6. Based on the title perform a particular action

The following code accomplishes the steps outlined above:

Step 5 – Merging Content Together

In this solution, there are four types of content to be merged:

1. Word documents
2. SmartArt graphics from presentations
3. Charts from spreadsheets
4. Tables of data from spreadsheets

Let's talk about each of these content types.

Step 5a – Merging Word Documents Together

By far the easiest way to assemble Word documents together is to take advantage of altChunks, which I have already blogged about in the past. In any case, here is the code necessary to merge documents together on SharePoint:

Pretty easy stuff!

Step 5b – Import SmartArt Graphics from PowerPoint to Word

Again, I've already blogged about importing SmartArt from PowerPoint to Word. Here is the code necessary to accomplish this task:

The only difference between the code above and the code I showed you in my previous post is that the code above works with files on SharePoint.

Step 5c – Import Charts from Excel to Word

Again, I am going to leverage the same code I showed you in a previous post called importing charts from spreadsheets to Word documents. Here is the same code modified to work with files that exist within SharePoint:

Step 5d – Import Table of Data from Excel to Word

In a previous post I showed you how to import a table from Word to Excel. Today, I will show you how to do the reverse. Here are the steps necessary to accomplish this task:

1. Create a Word table with the Open XML SDK that will hold the data from Excel
2. Open the Excel file with the Open XML SDK
3. Retrieve the specific sheet that contains the table of data
4. In the found sheet, locate the SheetData object, which contains the table of data
5. For every row in the SheetData object, retrieve all the cell data
6. Once all data in the row is retrieved, create a Word row with the same data
7. Append the created Word row to the Word table

To help with the tasks listed above I am going to take advantage of some of the Open XML SDK code snippets that were published. Here is the code necessary to accomplish the tasks outlined above:

Step 6 – Offer Assembled Document to User

The last step is to offer the assembled document to the user with an Open/Save/Cancel dialog as follows:

Here is the code snippet to create this dialog based on a document that is in memory:

End Result

Putting everything together and running the code we end up with a document that contains all the content contained within our library merged into a final report:

Pretty cool stuff!

Zeyad Rajabi