Is there a simple way to open Word and Excel documents in VB.NET for basic data extraction, without using COM to open instances of Word and/or Excel?

I basically want to have a program that runs on a file server which traverses through particular directories and opens certain Word, Excel, XML or plain text documents to extract data from them in order to populate a database. Obviously I have XML and plain text pretty well covered, but the File server won't have Office running on it, and since it's not doing any real automation within the documents, it doesn't seem like it would need to.

So, is there a way for VB.Net to open say, a Word document and traverse through it's objects in order to extract data, without opening an instance of Word?

Any ideas where I could look? The online lit. seems to all be about externally automating instances of Word, Excel etc. in order to get them to do something.

Thanks!

Aaron Edwards

Hello,

Excel can be accessed through ADO.NET. You set the extended properties to point to the appropriate version of excel.

Hopefully this will help: http://support.microsoft.com/default...N-US%3BQ316934.

If you save the document as a rich-text file or text file then maybe, but a word document I don't know about. I think with XP version and 2003 you can use the Word and Excel to save content as XML, but never messed with them.

Brian