When you need to process some Office file in your project you can use, for example, the Office automation mechanism. But it need to have Office installed on your machine.
Otherwise, for example, you can choose a third part library.
I think that you can find many libraries over the web, but, for my purposes, in some of the projects I worked on, I used Aspose libraries (home page http://www.aspose.com/).
With those libraries you can easily manipulate Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project!) without needing to have Office installed on your machine. You can open a navigate a document, or modify it or create a new document and fill it.
For example you can create a document with a table:
' We call this method to start building the table.
builder.StartTable()
builder.InsertCell()
builder.Write("Row 1, Cell 1 Content.")
' Call the following method to end the row and start a new row.
builder.EndRow()
' Signal that we have finished building the table.
builder.EndTable()
Following image is grabbed from Aspose site:
Aspose provides also libraries that allow you to manipulate PDF documents.
Like Office document, you can open, modify or create from the beginning a PDF document.
But you can also easily convert many documents types (Office, Html, Text, images) to the PDF format. The code to convert a document is very simple:
Dim doc As New Aspose.Words.Document(strIn)
doc.Save(strOut, Aspose.Words.SaveFormat.Pdf)
If needed, you can also converto to PDF/A. Other security features are available, like encrypt and decrypt PDF documents or sign it using PKCS#1, PKCS#7 and PKCS#7 detached signature types and with the use of digital certificate. No Adobe Acrobat Automation are required!
Aspose libraries are availables also for OCR and Barcodes.
For example, we worked on barcode recognition. Using Barcode libraries you can recognize barcodes from images or PDF, or writes them into the files. And both 1D and 2D barcodes types are supported (you can see all supported barcodes from this url: http://www.aspose.com/.net/barcode-component/key-features.aspx).
Following code allows you to reads barcodes on a jpg file:
Dim reader As BarCodeReader
reader = New BarCodeReader("C:\SamplePic\EAN13.jpg", BarCodeReadType.EAN13)
Do While reader.Read()
' get symbology type
Console.WriteLine("Symbology Type: " & reader.GetReadType().ToString())
' get code text
Console.WriteLine("CodeText: " & reader.GetCodeText())
Loop
reader.Close()
Other libraries are concerning SharePoint, Cloud and JasperReports.
All this componentes are very useful in many cases, and they are available for .NET and are built using managed code and can be installed and deployed as a single .NET assemblies. If you prefere, the libraries are available also for java, but this feature is off topic for us! :)
You can buy the single developer kit for your needs, or the full license (Aspose.Total).
You can get the OEM licence for unlimited royalty-free distribution, and I think this is a good solution.
The Aspose technical support is very good. You can count on a rich on line documentation with many code examples, dedicated forums with many posts and quick support responses!