Programmatically open existing documents

  • Article

The Open method opens the existing Microsoft Office Word document specified by a fully qualified path and file name. This method returns a Document that represents the opened document.

Applies to: The information in this topic applies to document-level projects and VSTO Add-in projects for Word. For more information, see Features available by Office application and project type.

To open a document

  • Call the Open method of the Documents collection and supply a path to the document.

    this.Application.Documents.Open(@"C:\Test\NewDocument.docx");

To open a document as read-only

  • Call the Open method, supply a path to the document, and set the ReadOnly argument to True in the method call.

    this.Application.Documents.Open(@"C:\Test\NewDocument.docx", ReadOnly:true);

Compile the code

This code example requires the following:

  • A document named NewDocument.doc must exist in a directory named Test on drive C.

Related content