[Mono-devel-list] OpenOffice and Mono C#

[Daniel Morgan]

Does anyone know how to programmtically use OpenOffice documents and
spreadsheets from a Mono C# application.

I have done stuff, such as, Mail Merge a document template with a data
source to create a new document with Microsoft Word and VBA.  I also
have created Excel spreadsheets and printed reports from Access mdb to
PDF files via Acrobat.  The PDF creation problem is no big deal - I
could use Ghostscript.

You can do this in VBA in a word doc or word doc template.  Or you do it
via a Word.Application and Word.Document objects in Visual Basic 6,
Visual Basic.NET, and C#.  Of course, this is using COM Interop for the
.NET stuff.

I would like to do the same, but I would like to use OpenOffice.  The
primary reason for using OpenOffice is cross-platform support.  Since
OpenOffice is open source, you are safe to store your documents,
spreadsheets, and other files in a format that can be used for years to
come.  If Sun shuts down the OpenOffice project, you can always still
use it or fix bugs.  

There have been many problems in the past about machine/os/apps becoming
obsolete.  Since they have become obsolete, there was no way to get
these old archived documents since the old software was closed source.

The new Office suite from Microsoft, Office 2003 is a security nightmare
to admins.  Office 2003 does a lot of things "for you" that in my
opinion should be left up to the user, such as, going out to the
internet to do various things without your knowledge.  This is not my
words, these words are those admins who support Office.

Moreover, I would like to be able to create cross-platform applications
written in C# for Mono that can interact with OpenOffice.