Create a New Document Using Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps, SharePoint, SharePoint Online

Posted on: September 30th, 2011 by estruyf 7 Comments

A few days ago I moved one of my personal domains to Office 365. One of the things I noticed is that you can create new documents without the need of a client application, everything is done by the Office Web Apps.

Create documents

Create documents

This is only possible from the Home page of Office 365. When you create a new document from within the document library itself, you still need the client application to be installed to create the document.

When I got back to the homepage of Office 365 I saw that it used the following url:

Spaces are added to the URL to fit on the page.

This URL can also be used on a SharePoint on-premise environment with Office Web Apps installed.

SharePoint On-premise with Office Web Apps

SharePoint On-premise with Office Web Apps

The CreateNewDocument page can be used to create Word, PowerPoint and OneNote documents. If you want to create Excel documents you need to use the following URL:

Spaces are added to the URL to fit on the page.

As you can see it makes use of another page called xlviewer.aspx.

URL Anatomy

CreateNewDocument

http://www.yourdomain.com/ TeamSite/_layouts/CreateNewDocument.aspx

Querystrings

  • ID: URL to the document template that is associated with the content type;
  • SaveLocation: the location to the document library where the document needs to be saved;
  • Source: the URL to the default view of the document library;
  • DefaultItemOpen: is set to 1.

xlviewer

http://www.yourdomain.com/TeamSite/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx

Querystrings

  • New: set to 1;
  • SaveLocation: the location to the document library where the document needs to be saved;
  • Source: the URL to the default view of the document library;
  • DefaultItemOpen: is set to 1.

What can you do with it?

You could add a HTML markup to your page with links to the documents templates, so you can create documents without the need of a client application. Like in Office 365.

Create documents

Create documents

Another approach could be to create a web part and check the available document libraries and document templates.

Web Part showing documents from the Documents library

Web Part showing documents from the Documents library

Web Part showing documents from the Facturen library

Web Part showing documents from the Facturen library

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7 Responses

  1. Jan Van Belle

    October 9, 2011

    Nice post! I will buy your custom web part as soon as it is available! ;-)

    Would it be possible to use the URL in content types?

    Reply
    • estruyf

      October 10, 2011

      Jan,

      You cannot use the URL’s in the content types, because they need to map to a template file location.

  2. Use Office Web Apps to Create New Documents | SharePoint Fun

    August 15, 2012

    [...] This is outlined really well over here: http://www.estruyf.be/blog/create-a-new-document-using-office-web-apps/. [...]

    Reply
  3. OJ

    August 31, 2012

    I’m really glad reading this. Looking for a solution quite a time. But: I’m not getting this done. Could you please give one or two hints concerning “You could add a HTML markup to your page with links to the documents templates”. No developer, just simple Sysadmin…

    Reply
    • estruyf

      September 4, 2012

      OJ,

      What I meant was that you can create links in HTML to create documents. The HTML format should look like this: <a href=”http://YOUR-DOMAIN/_layouts/CreateNewDocument.aspx?id=http://YOUR-DOMAIN/Design/Forms/template.dotx&SaveLocation=http://YOUR-DOMAIN/Design&Source=http://YOUR-DOMAIN/Design/Forms/AllItems.aspx&DefaultItemOpen=1″>Document</a>

      I hope you got enough information with this.

      Regards,
      EStruyf

  4. OJ

    September 5, 2012

    Thanks estruyf, works fine now!

    Reply
    • estruyf

      September 5, 2012

      OJ, thank you for the feedback.