Over the years, I’ve used various components to create
Microsoft Office Documents. They worked,
but I always felt weird about using a component to create something that should
come from Microsoft. There never was
anything directly from Microsoft.
I have been running a startup and we need to create
documents so that a certain set of customers can print things. It is not a huge need, but it is something
that is ultimately very important to these few. Out
startup is in the golf area. We need to
be able to print cart signs to go on the carts as well as alphabetized lists of
the golfers in a couple of formats. A secondary item was to be able to display QR Codes so that we could get the players started in our application a bit quicker. To
go along with this, we need to talk about our service platform. Our service runs in Azure as several
WebApps. It is great because we don’t
have to manage any servers. No worries
about some update hitting the servers, no worry about the updates, no worry
about much of anything.
My first thought was to do my old trick of designing the
document, displaying data on a web page, and sending the appropriate mime type
for MS-Word. I wrote this and it is
working today, but I ran into a problem.
This solution is great for just printing some documents and not worrying
too much about formatting. I was
manually modifying the resulting word documents too much, and it was not
something I could expect a user to handle.
Unfortunately, we need some more control in the formatting than I could
figure out what to do. The new mime type
solution was a clear no go.
The next option was to try the Open XML SDK from
Microsoft. I downloaded the SDK, and it
seemed to have a lot of documentation, so I thought it would be the right
selection. I thought, “Hey this is from
Microsoft, so it will do what I need. Because it is from Msft, a junior level
guy will be able to handle this.” After
about a week of this, it wasn’t happening at all. There were all kinds of little issues we were
causing things to not work. The nuget
packages created problems. He was
pulling his hair out. This just wasn’t
working. I started to look at options.
I “talked” to some of my friends of mine over email, if that is really talking. There were several components mentioned, and
about 40% of the response were Asposes family of components. We downloaded the nuget packages. In 3 days, my entry level developer had all
of the options I needed working. He had
items in the right spot. Everything was
working. A couple of more days, and had
had things formatted. We were testing
the formatting in ways that we couldn’t do before. The signs were coming out correctly. We create team lists, and that was working
properly. He had done all of this
quickly and easily using Aspose Words component.
One of my next steps was to create a QR Code document, that we could use to allow teams to scan the QR Code so that a team could immediately begin using our app with no login hassles and no need for their cell phone number. The team downloads our app from the Apple/Android app store, scans the QR Code that they get from their golf cart, and the app immediately loads using their web browser.
Aspose Words definitely worked and made our
lives easier.
