Solved Word and Excel Classes in Registry

[jmltinc]

Hi Folks,

I have an application (LabVIEW) which uses MS Office (specifically) to write data to reports. Our company migrated from Office to Kingsoft. The report generator does not work.

However, I have Office on my laptop and recently installed Kingsoft. LabVIEW opens Kingsoft with no problem. A peek at the code inside LabVIEW revealed it is calling the OLE class Excel.Application or Word.Application. Since Office was removed, so were the registry entries.

Does anyone know which registry values can be added with the class of Excel and Word, but point to Kingsoft? I do not believe this would be illegal in any sense...

Thanks,
-John

 

[Alejandro85]

No idea if it's illegal or not (to me it seems as there isn't legal trouble), but over all what you want don't make sense technically speaking, that's not how ActiveX works.

The registry entries you're referring to are just the tip of the iceberg on the Office automation API. Main problem is that the implementing binaries (ie, the Office .exe's and .dll's) are now missing after uninstall, so which component would you register? There is no file to point to.
You mention pointing to Kingsoft instead. That's guaranteed NOT to work. For one, the Kingsoft binaries have nothing to do with those from Office, they're completely different and work in different manners, and for sure don't implement the same ActiveX classes that Office do. Changing the registry to those files would only crash any application trying to use them, in the best of cases.
In addition, while you also mention "Excel.Application", that's again only the first one the program uses. Office uses ActiveX a LOT. Other classes include "Workbook", "Worksheet", "Cell", "Range" just to mention the most common ones. Re-registering the whole hundreds of classes (if not thousands) is impractical too.

Since this program uses explicitly the Office automation, it follows that for it to work Office MUST be installed on the same computer. By uninstalling it an immediate consequence is that it breaks it, as you figured out. There is no other way around other than reinstall Office to restore the working program. Or to get another version that doesn't uses Office in this way.

 

[jmltinc]

Thanks for the clarification.

I didn't think of all the DLLs which would need to be registered. That makes the idea moot.

Thanks, again.

-John