How to extract text from MS office documents in C#

For Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Word 2010 (.docx) files you can use the Open XML SDK. This snippet of code will open a document and return its contents as text. It is especially useful for anyone trying to use regular expressions to parse the contents of a Word document. To use this solution you would need reference DocumentFormat.OpenXml.dll, which is part of the OpenXML SDK.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854.aspx

 public static string TextFromWord(SPFile file)
    {
        const string wordmlNamespace = "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main";

        StringBuilder textBuilder = new StringBuilder();
        using (WordprocessingDocument wdDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(file.OpenBinaryStream(), false))
        {
            // Manage namespaces to perform XPath queries.  
            NameTable nt = new NameTable();
            XmlNamespaceManager nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(nt);
            nsManager.AddNamespace("w", wordmlNamespace);

            // Get the document part from the package.  
            // Load the XML in the document part into an XmlDocument instance.  
            XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument(nt);
            xdoc.Load(wdDoc.MainDocumentPart.GetStream());

            XmlNodeList paragraphNodes = xdoc.SelectNodes("//w:p", nsManager);
            foreach (XmlNode paragraphNode in paragraphNodes)
            {
                XmlNodeList textNodes = paragraphNode.SelectNodes(".//w:t", nsManager);
                foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode textNode in textNodes)
                {
                    textBuilder.Append(textNode.InnerText);
                }
                textBuilder.Append(Environment.NewLine);
            }

        }
        return textBuilder.ToString();
    }

Simple!

These two steps will get you there:

1) Use the Office Interop library to convert DOC to DOCX
2) Use DOCX2TXT to extract the text from the new DOCX

The link for 1) has a very good explanation of how to do the conversion and even a code sample.

An alternative to 2) is to just unzip the DOCX file in C# and scan for the files you need. You can read about the structure of the ZIP file here.

Edit: Ah yes, I forgot to point out as Skurmedel did below that you must have Office installed on the system on which you want to do the conversion.

I did a docx text extractor once, and it was very simple. Basically docx, and the other (new) formats I presume, is a zip-file with a bunch of XML-files instead. The text can be extracted using a XmlReader and using only .NET-classes.

I don't have the code anymore, it seems :(, but I found a guy who have a similar solution.

Maybe this isn't viable for you if you need to read .doc and .xls files though, since they are binary formats and probably much harder to parse.

There is also the OpenXML SDK, still in CTP though, released by Microsoft.

Read Document Text Directly from Microsoft Word File

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/getwordtext.aspx