Is there any C# Word Interop solution to convert a piece of text to a Richtext-format table other than the ConvertToTable() method?

Question

In our project, now we are using mail-merge solution to populate data from a SQL Server DB into a Word table, and then eventually generate a Word document, based on a Word template.

In the Word Template, the original Word table gets only a Header, and a blank row in the Body. (see the screenshot below).

However, there may be many records in the Database to be populated into the Word table, and thus the rows must be increased greatly to match the # of records in DB. So far we are using the C# Word InterOp method Word.Table.Rows.Add() to add rows one by one to match the # of records in DB. The snippet of C# codes is shown below.

==============================================================

            while (wordTable.Rows.Count < (dataTable.Rows.Count + colNameRow))  
            {  
                wordTable.Rows.Add();  
            }  

==============================================================

However, if there are hundreds or even thousands of records in a DB, the Word.Table.Rows.Add() method will definitely hit a performance issue. For example, to add 200 rows into a Word table, it will take about 35 seconds, from our benchmark test result.

After that, we surfed Internet and found out a C# Word Interop method, namely ConvertToTable(), which can convert a text into a table, and have a much higher performance than the Table.Rows.Add() method. Please refer to the hyperlink filling-table-takes-a-lot-of-time-in-ms-word

However, the ConvertToTable() method can only generate a table with a plain format, and there is not any RichText format, e.g, background color, the various column widths, the various text fonts, the various text effects (like bold/italic/underlined/color), so on and so forth. You will have to write more C# codes to apply the Richtext format upon the generated plain-format table, which will take more overhead and reduce the overall performance.

Now there is a C# Word Interop method, namely ConvertToText(), to convert the plain text in a range of a table into a piece of text. May I ask whether Microsoft can provide a solution, something like ConvertToRichtext(), which can not only encode the plain text of a table, but also can encode the Richtext-Format info of a table, e.g., the background color, the text font/color/effect, into a string. Subsequently, we can apply something like a ConvertToRichtextTable() method to convert the encoded string into a Richtext format. The solution will definitely bring us not only a high performance, but also an elegant Richtext table?

Thanks for any help in this regard.

Rgds,
Daniel

Answer 1

Hello, JackJJun-MSFT,

Thank you for the feedback. I will try to follow up.

Best Regards,
Daniel