Office Open XML Formats: Removing Comments from a Word 2007 Document

Article
05/23/2014

Summary: Use Office Open XML Formats to remove comments programmatically from a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document.

Office Visual How To

Applies to: 2007 Microsoft Office System, Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Ken Getz, MCW Technologies, LLC

September 2007

If you insert comments into a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document or set of documents, you might want to remove those comments before publishing or distributing your documents. You could open each document individually to remove the comments, or you can use the Office Open XML Formats to remove the comments programmatically, without opening the documents in Word 2007. This technique requires a significant amount of programming code, but the code is efficient and provides the best performance. Working with the Office Open XML File Formats requires knowledge of how Word 2007 stores the content, the System.IO.Packaging API, and XML programming.

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Code It | Read It | Explore It

Code It

To get started, download a set of forty code snippets for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, each of which demonstrates various techniques for working with the 2007 Office System Sample: Open XML File Format Code Snippets for Visual Studio 2005. After you install the code snippets, and have a sample Word document to use for testing, you are ready to go. For more information, see the Read It section later in this topic.

To create a Microsoft Windows Application project in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, open the code editor, right-click, select Insert Snippet, and select the Word: Remove Comments snippet from the list of available Office 2007 snippets. If you use Microsoft Visual Basic, inserting the snippet inserts a reference to WindowsBase.dll and adds the following Imports statements.

Imports System.IO.Packaging
Imports System.Xml
Imports System.IO

If you use Microsoft Visual C#, you must add the reference to the WindowsBase.dll assembly and corresponding using statements, so that you can compile the code. (Code snippets in C# cannot set references and insert using statements.) If the Windowsbase.dll reference does not appear on the .NET tab of the Add Reference dialog box, click the Browse tab, locate the C:\Program Files\Reference assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0 folder, and then click WindowsBase.dll.

The WDDeleteComments snippet loads the contents of the Word document and removes the comments from the document. To test it, create a sample document that contains comments, and save your sample document somewhere easy to find (for example, C:\Comments.docx). In a Windows application, insert the WDDeleteComments snippet and then use the following code example to call it, modifying the names to meet your needs. After you finish, open the Word document to verify that you removed all the comments.

WDDeleteComments("C:\comments.docx")

WDDeleteComments(@"C:\comments.docx");

The WDDeleteComments snippet code starts with the following code.

Public Sub WDDeleteComments(ByVal docName As String)
  Const documentRelationshipType As String = _
   "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/" & _
   "relationships/officeDocument"
  Const wordmlNamespace As String = _
   "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main"
  Const commentRelationshipType As String = _
   "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/ & _
   " 2006/relationships/comments"

  Using wdPackage As Package = Package.Open( _
   docName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.ReadWrite)
    Dim documentPart As PackagePart = Nothing
    Dim documentUri As Uri = Nothing

  ' Code removed here…

  End Using
End Sub

public void WDDeleteComments(string docName)
{
  const string documentRelationshipType = 
    "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/" + 
    "relationships/officeDocument";
  const string wordmlNamespace = 
    "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main";
  const string commentRelationshipType = 
    "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/" + 
    "relationships/comments";

  using (Package wdPackage = Package.Open(
    docName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.ReadWrite))
  {
    PackagePart documentPart = null;
    Uri documentUri = null;

  // Code removed here…
  }
}

This code creates constants that it uses to refer to the various schemas and namespaces required by the procedure, and retrieves a reference to the package itself by calling the Package.Open method. The code also creates variables that it uses to refer to the document part and the document Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).