MiniTool Supported Preview, Render and Transformation of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SVG, EPUB, XPS, etc to TIFF, PDF and other formats using APIs

About MiniTool

MiniTool Solution Ltd. provides customers with complete business software solutions in the data recovery and partition management industry. We were working on the new update of MiniTool Power Data Recovery which deals with the recovery of various types of files, we badly needed an easy, instant approach to help our users quickly preview these files before the recovery.

And Aspose.Total for .NET is such a complete package of all file format APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for .NET. which seamlessly allows us to use a set of libraries to achieve a wide range of tasks without more service installations.

Overview

Aspose.Total for .NET includes 22 types of libraries, namely

It enables the developers to create, edit, render, and transform various popular document formats in any. NET applications.

Pros:

Applying these libraries in our data recovery software comes in the following advantages:

Avoid installing a bundle of software. For instance, we are able to preview Word, Excel, PPT, and do various operations without installing Microsoft’s office suite.
Reduce the cost of software development. We can achieve a variety of application functions without going deep into every file format, huge savings in labor, and time costs.
Get a unified format. Aspose.Total for .NET makes it possible for us to convert multiple file formats into a unified file format like PDF for easy outputting and browsing. Such conversions bring easier development.

Cons:

To be honest, we haven’t noticed any obvious flaws. If we have to say something, multiple conversions sometimes affect its performance. What’s the story?

Since Aspose libraries do not provide a UI interface, and we also don’t want to use other plugins and software to help, therefore we have all file formats converted into TIFF. Such conversion may violate the original intention of Aspose library design, and its performance is greatly reduced after multiple conversions on the file format.

In addition, users should pay special attention to the warnings while applying several Aspose libraries simultaneously, because there are several conflicts among these libraries. Be careful when picking up a version of the 22 libraries.

Experience

2 Using the Code

With the help of Aspose.Total for .NET, we have been able to convert types of files to TIFF for file preview. In this process, some are direct conversion, some required multiple conversions; while for some file formats, the conversion is unnecessary.

2.1 Direct Conversion

Code snippet for converting Word files to TIFF format — Image 1:- Word to TIFF conversion code snippet

The operation of direct conversion is relatively simple as we can just call the Save function to complete this conversion. This operation is in accordance with the design of Aspose.Total for .NET and its usage rules. The performance we get totally depends on the performance of the Aspose library itself.

2.2 Multiple Conversions

Code snippet to convert EPUB, CGM, SVG and XPS to PPTX using Aspose.PDF for .NET — Image 2:- Conversion of various files to PPTX using Aspose.PDF for .NET

In order to maintain the color of CGM and SVG files, we had to save them first as PPT files, and then apply the function of Aspose.Slides for .NET library to convert them to TIFF format. This implementation is very inefficient and is contrary to the design of Aspose. Unfortunately, there is no good way to improve the performance of such a conversion.

2.3 No Conversion

It is not a good choice to convert JPEG, JPG, BMP, PNG, and other image file formats. Such files come with colors and the conversion is not necessary.

Summary

Overall, Aspose.Total for .NET worked great when we had large files and documents to work on. The rich libraries and APIs really impressed us and we are inclined to moving to Aspose to make our data recovery software more user-friendly