Previously, we’ve produced Office Open XML documents directly using the Open XML SDK, which meant having to keep track of various parts of the document that didn’t need changing! That approach meant dealing with things like string tables and needed an intimate knowledge of the internal structure of an Office Open XML document – not something I wanted to get too deep into. There were also a number of issues around memory footprint which resulted in a move to an even more difficult to manage phased export of the different portions of the document.
Using Aspose has been a completely different experience. Aspose.Words allows content to be added to documents using a single method call. The stateful tracking of the styles applied to a paragraph allows for easy styling of multiple paragraphs without keeping track of style references. The insert HTML feature provides straight-forward support for HTML content that has been supplied by end users. The large number of formats that can be saved with just the switch of an enum parameter makes the whole implementation extremely flexible both for us as developers and the end users.
Aspose.Slides makes it easy for us to support user-provided templates by opening existing documents and cloning content from them. Layout slides, master slides and the references between them are handled very neatly and are a clear example of how Aspose accurately represents the contents of documents without exposing the messy details of how they are actually stored. Aspose.Slides also exposes a large number of formats which can be saved to using the same data.
In Aspose.Cells, string tables are handled in the background and the text can simply be added to each cell in turn. Working with multiple worksheets is as simple as moving between items in a collection. All of the information about a cell (its contents, styling, format etc.) is stored and edited in one place and handling merging of cells is considerably simplified. Again, it’s also possible to save to a large number of file formats using Aspose.Cells.
Overall, Aspose provides a great abstraction to the Microsoft Office formats, whilst still maintaining a comprehensive set of features to allow you to create the full spectrum of documents that are possible in Microsoft Office. I would definitely recommend that anyone trying to automate the creation of Microsoft Office files should consider Aspose.
