Office Automation

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The ability to interact with office software and generate spreadsheets, text documents and presentations from code can be invaluable in the office, and win a lot of time for those that can do it. One example of this is the creation of applications that can read files in an arbitrary format and output an Excel file, a task much more efficient to be done with code then manually.

Using the OpenOffice UNO Bridge

OpenOffice has language bindings for C++ and Java and on Windows can also be manipulated via COM Automation (see below), but there is currently no easy way of using UNO (Universal Network Objects) from Object Pascal on OS X and Linux. If you're interested in developing an OO "bridge" for Pascal, please refer to these links for more information (caution: these links are quite techie in true Sun fashion):

api.openoffice.org

About_Bridges

Using COM Automation to interact with OpenOffice and Microsoft Office

Automation is unique to Windows so the following two examples won't work on OS X or Linux. For those platforms, please refer to Making do without Windows COM Automation. If you only need to create and/or view a word processing document from your program, take a look at the XDev Toolkit.

Here's a simple example of how to open a document with your program using the OpenOffice Automation server. Note that this works only on Windows.

program TestOO;

{$IFDEF FPC}
 {$MODE Delphi}
{$ELSE}
 {$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
{$ENDIF} 

uses
  SysUtils, Variants, ComObj;

const
  ServerName = 'com.sun.star.ServiceManager';
var          
  Server     : Variant;
  Desktop    : Variant;
  LoadParams : Variant;
  Document   : Variant;
  TextCursor : Variant;
begin
  if Assigned(InitProc) then
    TProcedure(InitProc);

  try
    Server := CreateOleObject(ServerName);
  except
    WriteLn('Unable to start OO.');
    Exit;
  end;

  Desktop := Server.CreateInstance('com.sun.star.frame.Desktop');

  LoadParams := VarArrayCreate([0, -1], varVariant);

   {Create new document}
  Document := Desktop.LoadComponentFromURL('private:factory/swriter',
                                           '_blank', 0, LoadParams);

  TextCursor := Document.Text.CreateTextCursor;

   {Insert existing document}  //Substitute your path and doc
  TextCursor.InsertDocumentFromURL('file:///C|/my/path/mydoc.doc',  
                                   LoadParams);
end.

Here's a simple example of how to open a document with your program using the Word Automation server. Note that this works only on Windows and currently can't be compiled with Free Pascal 2.2, only Delphi. Please check back later or test with a future version of FPC.

program TestMsOffice;

{$IFDEF FPC}
 {$MODE Delphi}
{$ELSE}
 {$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
{$ENDIF} 

uses
  SysUtils, Variants, ComObj;

const
  ServerName = 'Word.Application';
var
  Server     : Variant;
begin
  if Assigned(InitProc) then
    TProcedure(InitProc);

  try
    Server := CreateOleObject(ServerName);
  except
    WriteLn('Unable to start Word.');
    Exit;
  end;

   {Open existing document}  //Substitute your path and doc
  Server.Documents.Open('c:\my\path\mydoc.doc'); 

  Server.Visible := True;  {Make Word visible}

end.

Using the Free Pascal Spreadsheet Library

Another way to automate repetitive work with spreadsheets is to generate the file using the FPSpreadsheet library. This method doesn't require having any external application installed on the machine and several formats are supported.

Writing an Excel file using ADO

please write me.

External links

• Excel file format description on the OpenOffice website

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