Excel & Microsoft.Office.Interop

Question

I want to use the Microsoft.Office.Interop to read an Excel file from a web page.
Do I need to have Office installed on my web server?
I am not doing any manipulation to the excel file, just reading it in and storing the values to another page. I have no issues when I run on my local machine but I have Excel installed on my local machine. Anyone that knows this answer I would greatly appreciate your input.
Thanks JD

Answer 1

Using Interop requires that you have Office installed on the server. For websites, I would generally recommend using something like the open-source NPOI project. However, if all you ever want to do is read, consider using ADO.NET (see this question for more info).

Answer 2

I would add that if your using Excel as a datasource the ADO approach is much faster and requires less overhead. It restricts you to excel sheets that are pretty much structured as flat tables. But if I can use that method (all restrictions considered) I prefer it.

Ernie