Invoking Word for rtf to docx conversion

Question

I have a need to routinely programmatically convert *.rtf files into *.docx. Manually, this works just fine with Save As inside Word 2007 ... the resulting docx behaves just fine. Programmatically, I can't get it to work.

What I tried is basically the following:

Fetch RTF from Word

... but in the reverse direction. Instead of opening *.docx and using SaveAs to *.rtf, I'm opening the *.rtf and using SaveAs to *.docx. However, the resulting file won't open, and so evidently there's something I don't understand. Is

wordApp.Documents.Open(@"D:\Bar\foo.rtf")

not a legit thing to do?

Any thoughts about how to do this would be appreciated.

Overheat

The program itself runs without errors. If I try opening the resulting file, it merely yields 'Word experienced an error trying to open the file'. When I try to look at it with Open XML SDK 2.0 Productivity Tool, it reports 'File contains corrupted data'. – Overheat

can u please upload an example of the rtf which gives error? – Simaroubaceous

Answer 1

You can try this code, it works for me

var wordApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application();
var currentDoc = wordApp.Documents.Open(@"C:\TestDocument.rtf");
currentDoc.SaveAs(@"C:\TestDocument.doc", Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatDocument97);

I got the same error when I tried to use wdFormatDocument or wdFormatDocumentDefault

EDIT: this is an update to the code, it converts it but u will get the error once then it never appeared again!!

var wordApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application();
var currentDoc = wordApp.Documents.Open(@"C:\TestDocument.rtf");
currentDoc.SaveAs(@"C:\TestDocument", Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatDocumentDefault);
currentDoc.Close();
wordApp.Quit();

Simaroubaceous

Does MS Word have to be installed on the client machine for this to work ? – Iny

If you run this code from an asp.net then it should be installed on the web server, if you run this code from a windows app then your (client) machine should have MS Word installed – Simaroubaceous

Answer 2

Can you show the code where you are calling SaveAs? I am curious which Word.WdSaveFormat you are specifying. It sounds like it is saving the rtf data, but changing the extension to .docx.

Embarkation

I'm using WdFormatDocument ... but good idea, I'll play with some others – Overheat

Ah, when I use WdFormatDocumentDefault I can get to docx successfully, and also WdFormatDocument97 gets successfully to doc... thanks for the idea. Maybe the semantics of wdFormatDocument are different than I expected. – Overheat

I marked Pr0fesso0rX as the answer since that complete example is most likely useful to more folks in future ... but thanks, Mark, your hint got me there – Overheat

Answer 3

Here is the code that does conversion. The code is almost the same as shown above, with some small (but important) difference - it is necessary to use references (not objects themselves):

Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application _App = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application();
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document _Doc =  _App.Documents.Open("c:/xxx.rtf");

object _DocxFileName = "C:/xxx.docx";
Object FileFormat = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatXMLDocument;

_Doc.SaveAs2(ref _DocxFileName, ref FileFormat);

Spinous