Does Visual Studio Tools for Office require Office to be installed?

Question

Does Visual Studio Tools for Office require Office to be installed in order to work with excel files?

Answer 1

The System Requirements say the following:

Version of Microsoft Office: Developing and running Office customizations built with VSTO 2005 or VSTO 2005 SE requires at least one of the following versions of Microsoft Office

• Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
• Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 (only application-level add-ins work with Standard Edition)
• Microsoft Word 2003
• Microsoft Excel 2003
• Microsoft InfoPath 2003
• Microsoft Outlook 2003
• Microsoft Office Visio 2003
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003
• 2007 Microsoft Office system
• Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Visio 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007

Answer 2

From the MSDN

The Microsoft Office primary interop assemblies must be installed into the global assembly cache (GAC) and registered before you can create or run a Visual Studio Tools for Office solution. You can then write managed code to interact with a Microsoft Office application's COM-based object model. For more information, see How to: Install Office Primary Interop Assemblies.

This second link states:

You can install the complete set of primary interop assemblies in the global assembly cache in two ways:

• Perform a Complete installation of Microsoft Office.
• Install them from the redistributable primary interop assemblies package.

This redistributable can be downloaded from here