WinForm application and MS Office references

Question

In our WinForms project, we need to give a facility to import data from Excel sheets.

There are ways to refer MS Office files (here Office 2003) in your project references.

Each time there is slight difference in build environment the project reference breaks and shows an Excel missing error.

My question is How to correctly refer Office 2003 files into your WinForm Application?

Answer 1

This is a big issue with Office, we had it too (Office 2003 vs. Office 2007)

We had two solutions:

• Created a gateway library that was precompilled and referenced that instead of the real Excel dll.

• Used an external Excel library like ExcelReader.