Almost everyone uses Microsoft Word on a daily basis to create documents and save them once they are done. It offers a lot of functionality for creating documents that are rich in text, images, multimedia options, art clips, tables, and many other types of data. That is why it is the first choice of use when it comes to creating documents. Word documents, hence, created are saved in the popular Open Office XML document format with .docx extension.

As a .NET application developer, you would like to add document processing functionality to your applications. There are several APIs available for this purpose, but if you are looking for an open-source free-to-use API, you can achieve this using NPOI API in your application using C# or VB.NET as shown in this article.

Create Empty Word Document using Microsoft Word

Before we write a .NET application to create an Empty Word document, let’s have a look at how to do the same using Microsoft Word.

Steps to Create Word Document with Microsoft Word

You can use the following steps to create a Word document using Microsoft Office.

  1. Open Microsoft Word
  2. Select Blank document option
  3. From File Menu, select Save option
  4. When the File Save option appears, enter the file name and press Save Button to save it as an empty Word document

Create Empty Word Document using NPOI in C#

Now that we have seen how to create an Empty document using Microsoft Word, let us now proceed and see how to do the same in .NET application. We’ll be using NPOI API for this purpose and developing a console-based application in C#.

Just in case you haven’t installed NPOI in your .NET project, you need to install it first. You can learn about this in our detailed instructions guide for Installing NPOI for .NET.

Steps to Create Empty DOCX File in C#

Now that your development environment is ready, let’s not wait and jump straight into writing the sample console application to create an empty DOCX file using NPOI in C#. NPOI has XWPF namespace that contains the functionality of working with Word DOCX file format as shown in the code sample below.

using (XWPFDocument doc = new XWPFDocument())
{
    doc.CreateParagraph();
    using (FileStream sw = File.Create("BlankDocumentUsingNPOI.docx"))
    {
        doc.Write(sw);
    }
}

Conclusion

In this article, we showed how to create a Word document using NPOI API in C#. You can further explore the API functionality by studying the API documentation. In our upcoming articles, we will further explore working with NPOI API for document processing in C#. So stay tuned.