Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio .NET do not provide an OLE container control for Windows Forms

Microsoft Visual Basic versions 6.0 and 5.0 provide an OLE container control for embedding OLE objects directly on forms. The OLE container control provides a means for embedding OLE objects such as Microsoft Excel workbooks, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and Microsoft Word documents.

A similar OLE container control is not available for Windows Forms when you use the following:

• Microsoft Visual Basic 2005
• Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003
• Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2002
• Microsoft Visual C# 2005
• Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003
• Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2002
• Microsoft Visual J# 2005
• Microsoft Visual J# .NET 2003
• Microsoft Visual J# .NET 2002

You can achieve similar functionality by using the Microsoft WebBrowser control to host the document if the document uses ActiveX. Excel, PowerPoint, and Word all support ActiveX. Therefore, documents from those sources may be displayed by using the WebBrowser control.

For more information and sample code that shows you how to use Office documents together with the WebBrowser control, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: