MSDN OS Subscription, or not?

[howardkaikow]

I would try using MS Office dev edition - I believe it allows distributing runtime components so your users wouldn't need to deploy entire product.

There has not been an office dev edition since office XP.
In any case, only Access has distributible run times.

Also, I am not concerned with distribution, rather with:

1. Testing with each version of Excel.
2. If necessary debugging using VBA source, which requires more than just runtimes.

Another option that I would consider is to research on some third party grid control (Gridex2000 and TrueDbGrid come to mind first) that has "export to excel" functionality.

Has to be Excel.

If your budget is tight second option may save you some money - the only problem with this is I'm not sure if excel is required to be installed on the destination machine.

Excel will be required as there are no distributables for Excel.