Hi,
I'm attempting to generate a PDF of an Excel file where the second page is an embedded word document. The document has formatting and links that I can't replicate in Excel, hence embedding a word document. If I just use Flexcel to generate an Excel file, I can print to PDF from within Excel and everything works as expected. However I need to immediately provide a PDF, and when I do that the second page seems to be an image based on the document - the text can't be highlighted and links no longer work.
Is there any way to have the embedded Word document function properly when saving to PDF?
Thanks.
Hi,
Sadly this is not technically possible. When you embed a Word document inside Excel, what Excel does is to automate word.exe, and word.exe is the one that renders the word document. It doesn't have to be word.exe, you might embed an Autocad drawing, and Excel will just call autocad to display the file.
FlexCel cannot call word.exe or anything else, as it is designed to run in servers and calling arbitrary exes is a huge security risk. In fact, the full reason for FlexCel to exist is to avoid doing OLE automation: We coded a full embeddable Excel clone (without UI) to avoid OLE (because OLE crashes all the time, it is slow, 2 users can't use it at the same time, and there are licensing issues with using it). It would make little sense if we rewrote Excel to avoid calling it with OLE, but we used OLE to automate the word doc that is embedded.
Using OLE to automate word is a big no. So the only option to make this work was if we coded a full Word clone so it can understand the embedded docx and render it correctly. But that is outside our scope (believe me, writing an Excel clone is enough work...), and wouldn't help if you embed other kind of documents, like a powerpoint.
The image you get without links or texts is because when Excel calls word.exe to render the word file, it saves a "preview" as an image inside the file. FlexCel can see that image and export it, but it is just an image: no text and no links.