When working with Office Documents you may want to display these documents directly in Visual Basic, but do not want to create an embedded OLE object using the OLE container control. Instead, you would like to link to an existing document and open it as an in-place ActiveX Document object.

ActiveX Documents are embeddable OLE objects that behave more like ActiveX controls than traditional OLE objects. Unlike a normal embedded object, an ActiveX Document is not designed to be a contained object in a larger document. Instead, it is considered a complete document in itself, which is merely being viewed by a viewer (such as Internet Explorer) or is being collected into a single resource with other documents (such as a Binder file).

While Microsoft Visual Basic does not currently support hosting ActiveX Documents directly, you can work around this limitation by using the capabilities of Internet Explorer and its WebBrowser control. The WebBrowser control (Shdocvw.dll) is a part of Internet Explorer and can only be used on systems that have Internet Explorer installed.

But the Webbrowser control has lot’s of flaws. It can’t open the office viewer with the read only property. It can’t open the file stream and save it back to the server. There isn’t any support for the office automation so that the developers can’t extend the own functions.

Fortunately, the Edraw Office Viewer Component offers the solution. It acts as an ActiveX document container for embeding Office documents (including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Visio documents) in a custom form or Web page. The control is lightweight and flexible, and gives developers new possibilities for using Office in a custom solution. More information