Search for keywords inside word and excell documents

Question

Hello everyone I'm new to this forum actualy I'm a bit new to programing in .net as well I was working with sql serve mostly. To get to the point I'm writing small intranet application to help my collegues (no one of them has nothing to do with programing) to find files on our server shared documents(word and excell mostly) and my problem is how to index text that is inside the word or excell documents. If someone could just point me in right direction. Thanks

ivan.milovanovic · Answer

Thank you very much

spgilmore · Answer

The first thing to do is to extract the text and store it someplace that is searchable such as a SQL Server database. You can access the data inside the documents by automating the Excel or Word programs themselves. STW for automating excel and automating word. Here is a good link. This is a cheesy unreliable and fairly undocumented way of accessing this data but the whole world seems bent on it and Microsoft hasn't improved it yet but I think they will. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_wrcore/html/wroriautomatingexcelusingexcelobjectmodel.asp Once you have the data be mindful that it will become out of date. You should devise a mechanism to update the data when an excel or word document is updated so that it doesn't become stale. An alternative is to read the files themselves directly but the format differs by version just as the automation methods do. Find the formats here. http://www.wotsit.org/