title: Give users the ability to edit Word 97-2010 documents within a .NET application
body: <p>I was wondering if anyone has any idea of any product/method to give my end users the ability to edit Word documents within our C#/.NET application, avoiding the use of Automation and separate instances of Word opening outside of the application.  This is a possibility [backup plan!] - but one that I'd rather not have to implement (due to the amount of work involved and having users exit our application).</p>
  
  <p>I know that I could possibly use the WebBrowser control - but from what I've been able to find -- support for this is sketchy at best, and things such as toolbars are not present, and it does not appear to work with Word 2010 anyway.</p>
  
  <p>I've been evaluating a few products that claim to do this but many are lacking in features or produce compatibility errors within documents rendering them useless when opened in Word.</p>
  
  <p>We are using Word 2003 and Word 2010.  Our documents start out as .DOCX files through our custom merge/templating processes.</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions for products or other ideas would be great. </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Edit:
  We're creating documents without issue using OpenXML.  Fun stuff, works really well.  However, at the end of the day I would prefer to have users editing the created documents as well as legacy documents (created as .DOC files) within our .NET application directly.  Unforunately, with Microsoft removing the ability to embed via ActiveX/OLE, etc. there isn't a way to do this.  What I am looking for is a 3rd party product to achieve this, which should be virtually 100% compatible with both the .DOC and .DOCX formats.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>For those asking why ?  Security, ease of use, etc.  We are storing documents in a database.  Once I start dropping files on the filesystem and working with Automation support/macros, ... there's a lot of things that would have to be done to get the files back into the database / update, etc.  This is made especially difficult since Word doesn't expose the raw bytes[] of a document and files must be saved as temporary files somewhere on the fs.  Just a lot of headaches.</p>
  
  <p>So, the "easiest" solution - embed Word [seems not possible] or use a 3rd party product that supports editing .DOC/.DOCX files.</p>
  
  <p>An example is DevExpress XtraRichEdit control - unfortunately, while it supports a lot of nice Word-like/compatible features it only works with .DOCX files.. and isn't 100% feature complete, compared to Word.</p>