If I convert DOC, DOCX, XLS,... to XOD for viewing, do I need to install Office?

Product: Apryse Windows SDK

Product Version: 11.4.0

I preparing to remove/uninstall Office from my servers.
For viewing doc, docx, xls, xlsx,…, if I convert them to XOD first, do I still need Office?

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Hello, I’m AiRon, an automated tech support bot :robot:
While you wait for one of our customer support representatives, I can help you with your question.

When converting documents such as DOC, DOCX, XLS, and XLSX to XOD using Apryse’s Windows SDK, you do not need to have Microsoft Office installed on your server. Apryse’s SDK can handle these conversions directly without relying on Microsoft Office. This means you can safely remove or uninstall Office from your servers and still perform these conversions for viewing purposes.

Some things you can try:


  • Ensure that your server environment meets the prerequisites for running Apryse’s SDK without Office.

  • Use Apryse’s conversion methods to convert your documents to XOD format for viewing.

  • Test the conversion process to ensure that the output meets your requirements and does not require Office.




Here are some resources that might help you:



Hopefully, this helps you solve your problem while you wait for a human to get back to you.

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Hi, my name is Christopher, and I am a Support Engineer with the Apryse toolkit. As was indicated by the AiRon tech bot, Microsoft Office does not need to be installed for you to work with converting or viewing XOD files.

I would make sure you do have the ability to view them with another viewer on your machine prior to removing Office from your machine.
I would also recommend testing the ability to view them after removing Office from your first server in case there is an issue for some reason in the way things are setup. This would prevent you from eliminating Office from all machines prior to finding such a problem.

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Hi Christopher,
After removing Office, I got the error below when trying to convert DOCX to XOD.
It looks like the PDFNet still uses Word for XOD converting. Do you have any suggestion?

---> pdftron.Common.PDFNetException: Exception: 
	 Message: An error occurred while converting the file.
Detailed error:
	Failed to find the CLSID for "Word.Application".
HRESULT: Invalid class string
	  File: "Word.cpp":138
	Log:
	  Start check system account.
	  Session ID is: 0.
	  Done checking system account.
	  Start checking registry.
	  Registry check done.
	  Creating a Word application instance.

	 Conditional expression: false
	 Version      : 10.9.0-274970b356
	 Platform     : .Net Framework
	 Architecture : AMD64
	 Filename     : Convert.cpp
	 Function     : trn::PDF::Convert::ToPdf
	 Linenumber   : 2376

   at pdftron.PDF.Convert.ToXod(String in_filename, String out_filename, XODOutputOptions options)
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