Office File Conversion Utility

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I was involved in the first day of our Office Developer Training in Auckland yesterday. I presented a little utility that I wrote back in March that converts .doc files to their .docx equivalent. It also can convert .doc to pdf and xps print formats. I promised to share that utility through my blog today.

The advantage once you are in the .docx format (or any of the new office file formats) is that you can work with the content of the file without need office installed using the System.IO.Packaging classes in .NET 3.0.

Remember to take a trip to the openxmldeveloper site or watch this video to learn more.

The limitation with my application is that it references Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word (meaning Word 2007 is required on the machine running the application) and it spawns a single process of Word that runs in the background during the duration of the file conversions.

Again I'm not going to win any best practise awards for my code and it is of course provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

https://gobeyond.net.nz/msft/o12conversionwindows.zip

You might also like to install the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS 

Enjoy!