Prevent Word document's fields from updating when opened
c#, ms-word, office-interop
Solution
Well, I didn't find a way to do it with Interop, but my company did buy Aspose.Words and I wrote a utility to convert the Word docs to TIFF images. The Aspose tool won't update fields unless you explicitly tell it to. Here's a sample of the code I used with Aspose. Keep in mind, I had a requirement to convert the Word docs to single page TIFF images and I hard-coded many of the options because it was just a utility for myself on this project.
private static bool ConvertWordToTiff(string inputFilePath, string outputFilePath)
{
try
{
Document doc = new Document(inputFilePath);
for (int i = 0; i < doc.PageCount; i++)
{
ImageSaveOptions options = new ImageSaveOptions(SaveFormat.Tiff);
options.PageIndex = i;
options.PageCount = 1;
options.TiffCompression = TiffCompression.Lzw;
options.Resolution = 200;
options.ImageColorMode = ImageColorMode.BlackAndWhite;
var extension = Path.GetExtension(outputFilePath);
var pageNum = String.Format("-{0:000}", (i+1));
var outputPageFilePath = outputFilePath.Replace(extension, pageNum + extension);
doc.Save(outputPageFilePath, options);
}
return true;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
LogError(ex);
return false;
}
}
Problem
I wrote a utility for another team that recursively goes through folders and converts the Word docs found to PDF by using Word Interop with C#. The problem we're having is that the documents were created with date fields that update to today's date before they get saved out. I found a method to disable updating fields before printing, but I need to prevent the fields from updating on open. Is that possible? I'd like to do the fix in C#, but if I have to do a Word macro, I can.