I have read everywhere that Office 2003 is required for VSTO. Well, our users are still on Excel 2002. I successfully installed VSTO 2005 SE, and developed an "Office 2003" add-in for Excel. I replaced the reference to Excel, which was broken, to the Excel 2002 PIA. Everything built, and I could manually load the add-in via COM Add-Ins. This used VSTO's AddinLoader.dll because I could see the path. So it appears the shim was working.
But I am somewhat more interested in document-level customizations. Now, the VSTO install which includes these project types won't even proceed unless I have office 2003 installed, which I don't yet. I was deciding if I should install it and try to hack my way through a solution that can be deployed on 2002.
1. I haven't heard exactly why 2003 is required, and I got a VSTO application level add-in to work on 2002.
2. Are there any ways around the 2003 requirement, even if unsupported
I am only interested in Excel.
Thanks,
Amit