Reading, creating, editing, converting and, in general, processing Office documents at scale is quite difficult. There has never really been a good technical option to do this well – there is always one of three problems:
- Compatibility – Most tools out there are very limited, and can only handle some features in Word, but fail when complex content such as SmartArt, Tables of Contents, Tables-in-Footers, etc. are thrown at them. In addition, these tools are often only available for a limited set of programming languages.
- Fidelity – Small and large differences between how Word, Excel and PowerPoint display and process files vs. how they are handled by other tools leads to low-fidelity conversion. The spacing is wrong, or the headers are wrong, or the arrow that points at the key content is gone. Very frustrating, and unpredictable.
- Ease of use, and speed of development – The tools out there tend to be complex, hard to learn, and even brittle/easy to break.
Taken together, this is not a great place to be. We are talking about the leading business document file formats – the language of business. Surely the tooling could be better?
Cloudmersive has launched the Document Conversion and Processing API for solving high-compatability, high-fidelity conversion and editing, while still maintaning ease of use and speed of development. SDKs are available for NodeJS, Javascript, C#, .NET Core, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and Objective-C.
The Document Conversion and Processing API makes it incredibly easy to work with documents. Convert common current and legacy file formats, like DOCX/DOC, XLSX/XLS, PPTX/PPT into PDF with a single API call. Need to make a change first? This is done easily as well. Add/remove/overwrite or modify headers, tables, paragraphs, images, and more. Re-order content. Replace strings or placeholders with dynamic content, effectively using the Office document as a template – this can be great when the templates need to be built by business users. Merge multiple separate documents together into one document, again with a single line of code. Validating documents to ensure they are correct with a single line of code.
And again, native SDKs are available for all of the major web and mobile programming languages. This represents a huge improvement over the current state of the art.