Create Table in Word Document using C#

Tables are a wonderful way to organize data in your Word documents. A table can comprise multiple rows and columns where each combination of row and column is known as a cell. Each cell can have its text and different text formatting styles can be applied to the cell contents. Being a .NET application developer, you can provide the functionality of creating a table in a Word document in your document processing C# application.

This blog will show how to create a table in a Word document in C# using the free and open-source .NET API.

Insert Table in a Word Document using Microsoft Word

Before we can proceed to see how to create a table in a DOCX file, let us have a look at how we can do the same using Microsoft Word.

Steps to Create a Table in a Word Document using Microsoft Word

In order to create a basic table in a Word document, you can use the following steps.

1. Open Microsoft Word. It will open a blank document
2. Click Insert->Table. This will display a grid.
3. Move the cursor over the grid until you highlight the number of columns and rows you want.
4. Click when done and it will generate a table in the document

How to Create a Table in Word Document using C#?

Now that we have seen how to insert/create a table in a Word document using Microsoft Word, we can proceed towards doing the same using NPOI API for .NET in our C# application. If you haven’t already installed NPOI API, you can go through our comprehensive guide for NPOI API installation in your .NET project.

Step-by-step Guide to Creating Table in Word Document using C#

At this stage, your .NET project should be ready to write code for creating a simple Table in a Word document using NPOI API in C#. The following steps can be used for this purpose.

1. Create an instance of XWPFDocument for a new document
2. Create an instance of XWPFTable class for defining the table and specify the number of rows and columns for it
3. Traverse through each cell of the table using the GetCell method on each row of the table and set its contents using the SetText method of XWPFRun instance
4. Save the file to disc using the XWPFDocument instance defined in Step 1 above

You can use the following source code in your application to try it.

//Create document
XWPFDocument doc = new XWPFDocument();

//Create table
int row = 2;
int col = 3;
XWPFTable table = doc.CreateTable(row, col);
//Set table width
table.Width = 3000;
//Loop through the table
for (int i = 0; i < row; i++)
{
    for (int j = 0; j < col; j++)
    {
        XWPFTableCell cell = table.GetRow(i).GetCell(j);
        //Set style of the table
        XWPFParagraph para = cell.AddParagraph();
        XWPFRun run = para.CreateRun();
        run.IsBold = true;
        run.FontFamily = "NSimSun";
        run.SetText("This is Row" + i + "  and " + "Col" + j);
        table.GetRow(i).Height = (900);
        para.Alignment = ParagraphAlignment.LEFT;
        cell.SetVerticalAlignment(XWPFTableCell.XWPFVertAlign.CENTER);
    }
}
//Save the file
FileStream file = new FileStream("SimpleTable.docx", FileMode.Create);
doc.Write(file);
file.Close();

Conclusion

Tables provide an effective way to organize data in a presentable way in a Word document. This article showed how a simple table can be created using NPOI API in C#. A table can also include images and other types of data that we will be writing about in another blog. So stay tuned.