How to Read MS Word Files in C# — Visual Studio Tutorial (.doc & .docx)
earn how to read MS Word files in C# using Visual Studio. This tutorial covers reading .docx files with the Open XML SDK, reading .doc files with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word, and extracting paragraphs, tables, and plain text from a Word document in a C# console or WinForms app — no Microsoft Office required for the Open XML method.
In this step-by-step C# Word tutorial you'll install the DocumentFormat.OpenXml NuGet package, open a Word document for read-only access, loop through the document body, pull out every paragraph as a string, read table cells, and handle common errors like "file is in use by another process" and corrupted document exceptions. Everything is demonstrated in Visual Studio on .NET, and the same code works in console apps, WinForms, WPF, and ASP.NET projects.
⏱️ Chapters 00:00 — What you'll build 00:35 — .doc vs .docx: which method to use 01:20 — Creating the project in Visual Studio 02:10 — Installing the DocumentFormat.OpenXml NuGet package 03:15 — Opening a Word document for read-only access 04:40 — Reading all paragraphs into a string 06:20 — Reading tables and cells 08:00 — Reading legacy .doc files with Interop 10:15 — Common errors and how to fix them 12:00 — Full source code walkthrough
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