Last week, I was ordered to develop some kind of reporting tool for our web front application. First of all we chose to use Microsoft Office Interop library “interop.word” for word output. The aim of this post is to inform you that please do not go after that because simply it sucks!
It takes me 3 days to create a two page document. After all something horrible happened! If your document (in my case number of rows of a table) is a little large, it takes a lot of time to be generated, and it passes the timeout of your ASP.net application and finally ended up by an timeout error.
If you want word output simply use some third party libraries. In my case, I chose to generate PDF output, and I shift to PDFSharp library. It is amazingly fast and easy to use. I developed the same report in 5 hours (including reviewing the library documentation). Try it once, you will be the fan ;)
btw, its completely free…