How to allow user selection of activeX component?

[Obelix]

How can I reliably use activeX components (spreadsheet in my case) if my client may be using one slightly older/newer than the one I developed with? I am using a MS office Spreadsheet 9 component to develop with and it works great. However, I have taken my same application(true app, no dev environment) to 2 different machines and neither of them would display my spreadsheet. One was brand new running office '03, one was older running office 2k. Is there some way I can allow my clients to select their compnent type? Can I programmatically do it for them?

Another odd thing is that it works fine on all the development environments I have access to regardless of the version of excel. I'v tried it on 2 of these machines running office 2k and another running office XP(2002?). Is there a problem using it as part of a standalone app?

Any help would be appreciated.

[KileenC]

Hi,

One of the limitations of ActiveX and the Microsoft Office applications such as Excel is that the version of Excel that is being developed on the development machine must match the version of Excel that is running on the deployment machines. This is because the ActiveX components have methods/properties that are specific to that version of the application. You will want to make sure that you are using the correct version of the MS Office ActiveX control to correspond to the version of MS Office installed on the deployment computers.

You can include in your program an option to allow the user to specify the version of MS Office installed (or even programmatically check the version of Office installed). Have this version information wired to a Case structure in your program and then run the correct code based on the version of Office installed. I’ve included a program below that will allow you to programmatically determine the version of MS Word and Excel installed on a given computer.

Hope this helps!

Kileen