Primary Interop Assemblies for Microsoft Office Applications

Question

I'm trying to install Interop Assemblies for Microsoft Office on my web servers, for the use of reading word documents from my site.

Can I install just the Assemblies? Or the only way is installing an office suite?

The exception :

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

List of Interop Assemblies: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/15s06t57.aspx#pialist

Aerosol

Do not ever use Office automation from ASP.NET or any other server technology. The Office applications were made to run in a Desktop environment, will fail badly in an ASP.NET application if you're lucky; will cause many difficult to diagnose bugs if you're not lucky; are not supported and may not even be properly licensed if used from a server. – Ferocious

Answer 1

You need to install the full version of Microsoft Office if you desire to use the functionality. The interop assemblies within themselves do not provide any functionality, rather, these in turn invoke the functions from Microsoft Office itself. Hence you will need to install Office on the web server.

As an alternative, you could use the Office Sharepoint Server, which allows web users to generate MS Office document content.

Egocentric

While this does not apply to Version 14, I had this same issue with Office 2007 interop. I was able to install the trial on the server; this was sufficient, even after the trial expired. – Galatia

Answer 2

You need to install a DLL for Interop assemblies for various versions. Most of them are available on Visual Studio DLL Assembly repository.

Luxuriate