Does using PIAs require the user to have Office/Word professional?

[Bob Eaton]

I think the answer is yes, but I need to clarify for a project
specification:

Is it true that if we create a COM Add-in or VSTO project that uses the
Office/Word PIAs to access Word documents, then the users of our product
will have to have Office/Word professional? i.e. it's not just the developer
that must have Pro (which would be okay), but even users of an assembly that
uses the PIAs must have Pro?

If so, is there any way to read a Word document that doesn't require this?

Thanks,
Bob

P.S. We're basically looking for a way to harvest words from within Word
documents for corpus building and don't think it's going to be possible to
require users of this tool to have to have Word Pro.

 

[Norman Yuan]

Yes, the users need appropriate version of MS Office application installed.
PIA is simply NET wrapper to the MS Office application's COM interface, so
that .NET code knows how to talk to COM objects in MS Office application.

BTW, when creating COM Add-in with VS2003/2005, you do not need MS Office
Pro. It is VSTO project that needs MS Office Pro, or stand-alone
Word/Excel/Outlook. This applies to MS Office2003. I do not know if the same
"Pro" requirement applies to Office2007 and VSTO2005SE. MS makes thing very
confusing, which effectively kills a lot of desire of developing VSTO
projects.

 

[Bob Eaton]

Just to clarify, I realize (of course) that the user must have MS Office,
but my question is, does s(he) need Office *Pro* to use a COM Add-in (not
VSTO) assembly which acceses the PIAs?

Or in other words, will the PIAs install on a machine with MS Office
standard, Student edition, etc.

I thought I read somewhere that the PIAs will only install on a machine with
Office Pro, so I'm trying to confirm that.

Thanks,
Bob

 

[Ignoramus]

Hi,

On of my users has reported that her MS Office 2003 Standard version
failed to run my customization that is built with VSTO and therefore
use PIAs. With no error message, when the customization template is
opened, simply none of its code is executed, like if it were a usual
"static" template. It makes me suspect, though I'm not 100% sure, that
COM Add-ins built with VSTO won't run either.

I'd ask if somebody could give me the link to where people can ugrade
from 2003 Standard to 2003 Pro? I've tried to search the MS website,
but they have replaced all links with Office 2007, but I believe that
upgrade within 2003 version should still be available too...

Thanks,
Oleg.

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Bob,

Just to clarify, I realize (of course) that the user must have MS Office,
but my question is, does s(he) need Office *Pro* to use a COM Add-in (not
VSTO) assembly which acceses the PIAs?

Or in other words, will the PIAs install on a machine with MS Office
standard, Student edition, etc.

I thought I read somewhere that the PIAs will only install on a machine with
Office Pro, so I'm trying to confirm that.

No, the PIAs will install from any version of Office 2003, as long as the .NET
Framework is already installed. Or they can be installed after the fact (once
the Framework, with the GAC, is available).

Office PRO is only required for VSTO document-level customizations, since they
use functionality not available in all Office 2003 editions (XML support).

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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