WPS Office Adapter

[donnyh13]

Greetings AutoIt community!

I did a quick search and found nothing posted for working with WPS Office using AutoIt so far, though I did see a few requests for it over the years.

In my testing and research I have found that WPS Office seems to be just a free, re-branded version of MSOffice. Underneath the makeup, the COM methods etc are all the same, even the CLSID’s! That being the case you can use the UDF’s by water (or others) meant for working with Microsoft Office’s products, such as the Word and Excel UDF’s included with AutoIt already, as well as the PowerPoint UDF by water, found here: https://www.autoitscript.com/forum/files/file/374-powerpoint-udf/

That being said, I have not exhaustively tested automating WPS using the MSWord COM methods. Though I have used many MSOffice COM methods, etc., for automating WPS without a problem, you are encouraged to do testing yourself and make sure it works. I do not have much experience with MSOffice and related products, and thus may not be able to help much with bugs, but I will try to help as time permits.

The question will arise, why did I have to make a function, since these two Office programs are seemingly identical? Well, First, to open a new instance of WPS Office programs (Writer, Spreadsheets, Presentation), the Class names are different. (KWPS.Application vs Word.Application; KWPP.Application vs PowerPoint.Application; KET.Application vs Excel.Application). And secondly, when connecting (or attaching) to an existing instance of WPS, you can easily get a MSOffice application Object instead of a WPS Application Object, and vice versa, if you so happen to have both installed and running. Thus I added a check for the Registry path to contain the string “\kingsoft\” to ensure you retrieve the intended object. (If anyone has a better method, I would appreciate any hints. The CLSID’s are identical, as well as the class name when it is running (Word.Application; Excel.Application; PowerPoint.Application))

So far I haven’t come up with a better name, so I have called it simply “WPS Office Adapter” because it allows you to use MS Office UDF functions for WPS. Any suggestions for a name will also be appreciated.

The functions I made are copies from those written by water in the respective MS Office UDFs, with modifications to work with WPS, and some personal preference. Once you retrieve the Object you need for the WPS application, simply use those Objects in the respective MS Office UDF function.

Also, in order for the examples of WPS Presentation to work, you will need to modify the Include path to point to the PowerPoint UDF, or place a copy into the main WPS UDF folder.

Question or comments, or suggestions are welcome and appreciated. And also, if you wish to take this function and improve it or expand it, feel free, I’m not intending to go further than I have, with the exception of perhaps bug fixes as time permits.

The Functions that replace existing MS Office functions are as follows:

• _WPS_Presentation_Attach -- Replaces --> _PPT_PresentationAttach
• _WPS_Presentation_Open -- Replaces --> _PPT_Open
• _WPS_Spreadsheets_BookAttach -- Replaces --> _Excel_BookAttach
• _WPS_Spreadsheets_BookList -- Replaces --> _Excel_BookList
• _WPS_Spreadsheets_Open -- Replaces --> _Excel_Open
• _WPS_Writer_Create -- Replaces --> _Word_Create

Previous versions can be found here: https://github.com/donnyh13/WPS-Office-Adapter

Best regards,

 

WPS-Office-Adapter-0.1.0.zip

Edited Monday at 04:42 PM by donnyh13

[donnyh13]

New minor release. v0.1.0

• Fixed a missing Return which was causing a new WPS instance to be created each call, regardless if one was already open.
• Integrated Excel close on quit so that Excel_Close will work as normal.

Sorry it took so long to find and fix, new file is in first post.

Best regards,

Donny

Edited Monday at 04:41 PM by donnyh13

[water]

Added your UDF to the Wiki  

[water]

I just downloaded your WPS UDF and compared it with the Excel UDF, function _Excel_Open.
Winmerge  only displayed a few lines as changed.

A crazy idea popped up  
Add a WPS compatibility mode to the MS Office UDFs.
A script would only need to set a global variable ($g__WPS_Compatibility = True) 
All functions would then handle WPS like MS Office without further changes.
What's your opinion?

[donnyh13]

4 hours ago, water said:

Added your UDF to the Wiki

  Thank you

4 hours ago, water said:

What's your opinion?

 I think that would be a great idea @water. It would make for much less confusion when switching between this, and the main Excel (etc.) UDF.

Since it's a global variable, it would also allow for users to (in the rare cases), work with WPS and MS Office at the same time too. (Maybe transferring a WPS doc to MS Office). Since (to the best of my knowledge), the API functions are all the same, it should work seamlessly even if both WPS and MS Office are used at once.

Thanks, and Best regards,

Donny

 

Edited 13 hours ago by donnyh13

[donnyh13]

@water, I got wondering one thing, how would the examples be handled? Have an automatic switch on error from MS Office to WPS compatibility when trying to run Excel_Open, etc?