As far as I know in the past excel is an activeX object which is installed with excel or office and is part of the licence, so I was under the impression that inorder to communicate with excel (ei through automation) you needed to install the application. HOWEVER, I was recently at a Microsoft developers event (included a session about office 2007 beta) which the speaker mentioned that this will nolonger be the case, you waill be able to automate both excel and work documents without having the application installed on the machine, but not powerpoint. This might have to do with the change in document formats from .doc and .xls to .docx and .xlsx. Essentially the new format will be a zipped XML marked up doccument with much more open format so the office suite in not as needed for automation (opening the way for much more programability and 3rd party software interactions). I could be wrong about needing to install office to get the office support to work for the report generation since I use LV 7.0 and OfficeXP.
Paul
