What I did was have Office 2003 installed and upgraded (ie ran Office
2007 installer). This removed Office 2003.

I then started developing my application (actually part of a larger
application), and realised when I came to the Excel part that most
people (including the other developers building bits for this app) would
be using Office 2003. At this point I installed Excel 2003 (as part
of an Office 2003 install where I only installed Excel) alongside my
Office 2007 install. No problems at all (except I've since noticed that
the .xls files are registered to Excel 2003 now - but that's a minor thing).

Yes, both versions of the Excel PIAs are present - however, Excel 2007
(and all Office 2007 apps) installs with the PIAs some redirect
assemblies which mean that when an application requests an Excel 11 PIA,
they're redirected to Excel 12.

When I added a COM reference, I selected Excel 11. However, I noticed
yesterday that actually the file this refers to in the Properties view
of this reference is the 12 version. Hence anything I build will
require Excel 12 installed.

Ideally the redirect I posted should be done in VS2005 (actually,
ideally it VS2005 should by default ignore the redirect) as if you have
explictitly requested Office 11 COM objects it shouldn't then use Office
12 ones. If it was done this way, then the application would be build
for Office 2003, but when run on an Office 2007 machine, would work fine
as the MS redirect assemblies would do their job.

The other solution that Walter Wang from MS suggested is to remove the
Office 2007 PIAs from my machine, and only have the 2003 ones installed.
At the moment, I have no need to specifically develop for Office 2007
apps, so this might be the best option, although I'm glad I found a work
around.

Hope that helps,

David

Bill F wrote:

Walter:

I followed your suggestion below: I uninstalled the Office 2007 PIAs by
running the Office installation program and making sure each .Net Program
Support item was set to Not available. I checked the GAC and saw that all
the Office.Interop assemblies are gone excep Access.dao. Then I tried to
install the redistributable Office 2003 PIAs by running O2003PIA.msi that I
downloaded from the link you provided:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/t...displayLang=en

When I do this, I get the message "Please install Microsoft Office 2003
before installing this product. So this PIA installation program will not
let me install the Office 2003 PIAs while I have Office 2007 installed.

How do I install the Office 2003 PIAs when Office 2007 is already installed?

Bill



So how do I install the
"Walter Wang [MSFT]" <wawang (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

Hi David,

Looks like only applications compiled against Office 2003 PIA can run on
system with Office 2007 installed, applications compiled against Office XP
PIA will not be able to run on system with Office 2003 or 2007:

#ArtLeo's WebLog : Office System 2007 PIA Compatibility
http://blogs.msdn.com/artleo/archive...24/560418.aspx

Regards,
Walter Wang (wawang (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com, remove 'online.')
Microsoft Online Community Support

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Correct - Office 2003 and 2007 are special cases. Prior to 2007, you
could only target a single specific version of Office, and if you needed
to support multiple versions you needed a separate binary for each.

With Office 2007 Microsoft made it backwards compatible and added the
redirection assemblies so that Office 2003 apps would run on Office 2007
without any recompiles or changes. However, its these redirection
assemblies which are confusing VS2005 into compiling against Office 2007
PIAs rather than Office 2003.

Thanks for your help though,

David

Walter Wang [MSFT] wrote:

Did you have Office 2003 (or any part of it) installed at the time of
installing the PIAs? You do need one of the apps installed before you
can install the PIAs.

D

Bill Fallon wrote:

No, there is no part of Office 2003 installed, only Office 2007. However, I
did find a solution.

This solves the problem of developing .Net application that uses the office
interops (PIAs) on a development computer having Office 2007 installed,
where the application works on a client computer with either Office 2003 or
Office 2007.

The solution is:

1. Make sure the Office 2007 PIAs are not installed on the development
computer. Do this by going to the Office 2007 setup program and setting the
..Net Programmabilty support to Not Available for each Office component.

2. Copy Office 2003 Interops to a directory on the development computer
with Office 2007, say D:\Dev\NetRedist. Note: running the Office Interop
redistributables installation program o2003PIA.msi downloaded from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/t...displayLang=en

requires that Office 2003 be installed, so it won't work because Office 2007
is installed. So, go to a development machine with Office 2003 installed.
From a .Net project add a reference to the desired Office 2003 interop, e.g.
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel version 11 (use the Com tab and selection
Microsoft Excel 11 Object Library). In the properties for this reference
set Copy Local to true. This places Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel in the
bin\debug directory. Copy this file to D:\Dev\NetRedist on the development
machine with Office 2007.

3. In the Office 2007 development computer, add a reference to the interop
by selecting the browse tab and navigating to D:\FMI\Dev\NetRedist.

4. Select Copy Local to True in the reference properties to put a copy of
the Interop in the bin\debug directory.

5. Include the interop with the application assembly in the application
setup program. Make sure the application assembly and interop are in the
same directory on the client computer.

This approach does not require a config file with a redirect. I've tested
it and it works.

Bill



"David Hearn" <david.hearn (AT) newsgroup (DOT) nospam> wrote

See the following post:

Wrong Interop Version of Excel loads

http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups...1-11c7e5ce3524

I think there's a simple answer that still allows you to keep both versions
of Excel on the Dev machine.

--
Stephen
there are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and
those that don''t


"David Hearn" wrote: