Opening document from a stream

Question

Is there a way to open a presentation from a stream, memory file or isolated storage?

I have a presentation file that I want to open in PowerPoint, but do not want to allow user to access the file itself. Unfortunately the Presentations.Open() function of PowerPoint (and Open() of all other Office applications) only accepts a path parameter, which means I must save the file somewhere on the disk and then open it in PowerPoint, which will consequently give user access to the file.

Has anyone done this in any Office application?

Answer 1

You can use the OpenXML SDK to open documents from a stream, but not from within an Office application.

But, if you're motivated enough, you could delete the file after it's closed. It's pretty simple, you just need to create a separate process and wait for the file to not be locked for writing any more. Or, if you know when it's closed (e.g. if you do the closing in code), you may not need a separate process.