CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++comms-office
Sumit Jain
Sumit Jain

Reputation: 1528

Advantages of COM over implementing your own Office library

COM has severe performance penalty since it creates a separate process with all the resources allocated like a normal application instance. Also it requires Microsoft Office to be installed on the system and is not cross platform. So are there any advantages of using COM other than saving effort of churning your own library.

Also are there any open source implementations available for C++ for handling Office files or one has to build everything from scratch? How difficult is to build such a library to support all capabilities?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 79

Answers (1)

Ernest Friedman-Hill
Ernest Friedman-Hill

Reputation: 81724

Supporting all capabilities would not be just difficult -- it would be pretty much impossible. Office documents are layer upon layer of historical kludges, mistakes, and design decisions good and bad. And much of it is undocumented.

But supporting some capabilities is certainly doable, and some libraries do exist. Apache POI, the one I'm most familiar with is in Java, though.

Upvotes: 4

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