Visual Basic OLE Portability Issue

I am writing a GUI application that I want to display data in table format. The first thing I think of is to use Excel through OLE. But this is the first time I use OLE and I am particular concern about the portability of my program, as the program will be running on machines that could have different version of Excel than the one I use here, or even worse, they might not even have MS Office installed. With that uncertainty, can I still use OLE? If not, does anyone have solved similar problem with a different method? Thank you very much.

If office is not installed (at least Excel) then the user can not call the program via OLE since it is not on the machine.

Welcome to VBForums :wave:

If all you want to do is display data in table format, there is no need to use Excel or the OLE object - you can use the controls provided with VB such as the FlexGrid or ListView.

To add one of those to your toolbox, go to "Project" -> "Components", and in the list select the relevant item ("Microsoft FlexGrid Control 6.0 (SPx)" or "Microsoft Windows Common Controls 6.0 (SPx)").

Depending on what you want the user to do with this information (besides read it) you might also consider the WebBrowser or DHTMLEdit controls.