Showing a Word document within a form

[SteveShanks]

Hi all

I'm looking to create a Word document with text and pictures as a basic online help for my app. basically pop the document up in a form within the app.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could accomplish this allowing for the fact that the user may not have a copy of Word on their machine.

Was thinking about saving the document in HTML or something and then is there a control I could use to display it?

many thanks
Steve

 

[ThatRickGuy]

Saving the doc to HTML and using a web browser control is going to be your best bet I think. I'm not sure if there is a .Net web browser control, but the COM based one should work.

-Rick

VB.Net Forum forum796 forum855 ASP.NET Forum
I believe in killer coding ninja monkeys.

 

[SteveShanks]

Thanks, I'll have a look

Steve

 

[SteveShanks]

Can anyone give me some pointers on which control would be best. I'm not familiar with anything suitable on the .NET or COM side.

Thanks
Steve

 

[chrissie1]

What version do you have of Visual studio.


Christiaan Baes
Belgium

"My new site" - Me

 

[SteveShanks]

I'm running VB.NET 2003 (v7.1.3088) on Framework v1.1

Cheers
Steve

 

[chrissie1]

Then you need the com object named axwebcontrol. It's actually ieexplorer and your setup project will tell you that it's protected and some other blah-blah but it works and never mind the warnings.

The com object can then be added to your form and you can navigate to your page of preference using the navigate function of the control.

you can find plenty of examples on this forum or on google.


Christiaan Baes
Belgium

"My new site" - Me

 

[SteveShanks]

Thanks Christiaan

 

[infinitelo]

I think i have lost my mind.... but i thought i saw a tool that would build .chm files, I think that may be hard to write, but would look very professional....

did a quick help serch on ver2003 and found a help provider namespace.

worth a quick look i think.

have fun



if it is to be it's up to me

 

[chrissie1]

there are plenty of chm builder things out there. But who needs help files. A good program should be easy enough so any id10t can use it.

Don't forget sarcasm.

Christiaan Baes
Belgium

"My new site" - Me

 

[SteveShanks]

HI

I have included the axWebBrowser on my form but get several errors when it hits this line 'CType(Me.WebBrowser, System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize).EndInit()' in the InitializeComponet section.

the error I get 4 times is:
A first chance exception of type 'System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException' occurred in system.windows.forms.dll

Additional information: Unknown error

and then I get the same error 3 more times on the .Navigate call

If I continue through them then eventually the .navigate method executes and I see my HTML page in the control.

How do I get around these errors?

Thanks
Steve

 

[SteveShanks]

Quick update,

I have rebuilt the project and I don't get these errors if I run the .exe directly, only when in development

Any thoughts

Thanks
Steve

 

[BenCAdams]

Hey Steve,
Don't know if you ever figured this out, but I had the exact same error under the same circumstances (only when in dev, not if I ran the EXE directly). Turned out that creating a new solution fixed it for me. I had two versions of a project - an older one that didn't get this error and a newer one that did. Hoping to find the culprit, I spent hours trying to incrementally change the old project to match the new one. In the end, I had two identical projects. The code, assemblies referenced, csproj files, EVERTYTHING was identical (except for the compiled executable of course)... Same thing - old one worked, new one didn't. The only thing remaining that was different was the sln file. I created a new solution, added my project to it, and voila - it worked again. Wish I'd tried it about 4 hours ago!