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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T16:00:34+00:00

I want to read MS word files which were created using older office tool

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I want to read MS word files which were created using older office tool (office 2000 or office 2003). Currently I am using Office.Interop API with C#, but this API is slow and buggy. It throws COM exceptions which are somewhat difficult to handle.

Recently (today morning 😉 ) I came to know about Open XML format for working on office files. I would like to know about performance of this Open XML format SDK.
Does it use COM internally or is it completely new API?
Can we use this SDK for office 2000 or office 2003 files?
Is it faster than Office interop API?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Open XML is a completely different format from the older format and was introduced with Office 2007.

    It is essentially a zip file containing XML documents, so I doubt the API uses any COM at all. It can only be used for the newer files (docx, xlsx, pptx etc), so will not work with office 2000 or 2003 documents (doc, xls, ppt etc).

    I don’t know if it is faster – you will have to benchmark this yourself, with whatever metrics you find important.

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