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