Hi all, looking for a little advice.

I just got off the phone arguing with one of our server engineering guys, because they won't install the 12.0 oledb driver on the servers. He basically told me that Microsoft does NOT support Office components installed on servers, because Office is specifically designed to work with clients only.

My first question is, is this true? I read some things about it on the web, but it looked more like Microsoft didn't support installing the actual Office suite on a server (which is understandable). I don't understand why it would be such an issue to install a driver that let me read/write office documents.

If this is true, can someone point me to a good resource for reading/writing Excel spreadsheets as XML files. It seems XML is surely becoming a standard, so I would like to learn how to do more with it. I'd also like to get away from all the "connection string" crap that seems to come along with each release of Office.

Any and all help would be appreciated.

Mods, I did not know exactly where to put this, so please move to an appropriate forum if necessary.