Dear all,

tried to research on that but sometimes I seem to lack some googling skills...

I want to develop a (standalone) WinForms application which uses automation for communicating with Excel. I already know how to use the Interop, but I thought the VSTO tools would provide a more comfortable or sophisticated way to do that.

My idea was:

• I could build a new standalone project with the excel references prepared.
• I could use a more sophisticated object model supplied by VSTO to communicate with Excel.

However, my findings so far make me think that:

• VSTO can only be used to build add-ins/worksheets for Excel, not to build standalone application.
• There is no more sophisticated object model than the one provided by the Interop (which has such ugly things as a locale bug, a "Open(Missing, Missing, Missing...)" method and so on.
• I found a Worksheet and a Workbook class in the VSTO namespace, but as far as I understand it, these always refer to the CS classes for sheets and workbook which you implement when defining an Excel add-in or a workbook extension. - They cannot be used as comfortable wrappers in a standalone application.

Can anybody confirm these statements or correct me where I am wrong?

Further, if there should be a way to use VSTO and its "Workbook" class to load an excel workbook from a standalone application, then how do I do that?

Thx, chiccodoro