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I need to develop a windows app program. I have Office 2013 in my Machine. And I need to develop the app which supports Office 2013 User machine also. How to do reference dll for it?

I expect that I will develop using Office 2013 and it should supports(the app should work) on Office 2010 also

I have made the app with excel 14.0 reference file. So that if a machine have excel 2010, then the app couldn't open on that

Saran Mohan
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  • Can you advise what problems you have encountered? – ProgrammingLlama Jul 01 '19 at 04:19
  • Please be more specific what you mean by "supports Office 2013" and "supports Office 2010". – Raymond Chen Jul 01 '19 at 04:25
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    If you have problem with references to office's DLL, you can try open source [Excel library](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/151005). – Han Jul 01 '19 at 04:33
  • I have made the app with excel 14.0 reference file. So that if a machine have excel 2010, then the app couldn't open on that – Saran Mohan Jul 01 '19 at 07:18
  • what do you mean by "supports" exactly? What functionality do you require? If you're talking about using COM interop, it's better if possible to avoid that, and either manipulate the data files directly, if you're just creating content, or maybe you might want to use an Office Add-in to do your job, or some other background automation. Interop is slow, buggy and generally unreliable. But if you do really need it for some reason, then I suggest you could [start here](https://www.google.com/search?q=net+office+interop+support+multiple+versions) to try and solve your issue – ADyson Jul 01 '19 at 09:50

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Things go the other way around with Office!

To support all versions of Office back to 2010, you have to develop and maintain your WinForms application with Office 2010, that is the oldest version of Office that you want to support. Whenever you deploy your application on a machine that has Office 2010 or a more recent version, it will work. But it will fail with older versions such as 2007 and 2003.

This design makes sense since one cannot expect that a workook developed with say, Excel 2016, can be run by Excel 2010 without error. The 2016 workbook may use features that did not exist in 2010.

RobertBaron
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  • hi robert, the prob is I want to have latest version that is Excel 13 or 16 in my machine.. and am developing the apps in it and I wanted to work these apps while executing in another machine who s having excel 2010 – Saran Mohan Jul 02 '19 at 08:04
  • Hi Saran, I know but what I described is how one can achieve backward compatibiity with Office. I have been maintaining an Office-based application for 15 years for multiple clients running different versions of Office. This is the approach recommended by Microsoft. I no longer have the link where I read this many years ago. You could probably find it or I can look for it, if you want. – RobertBaron Jul 02 '19 at 08:13
  • Does my answer make sense? – RobertBaron Jul 02 '19 at 10:58
  • Hi Robert, Thanks for your response. Working with lower Office version can eradicate the problem. But I need to work with an higher version in order to achieve some other requirements. Unfortunately clients are using lower and higher versions. So Is there any way apart from using lower version?? – Saran Mohan Jul 03 '19 at 07:35
  • Unfortunately, no. But you can maintain more than one version until clients using older versions upgrade to the more recent version. By the way, clients on 2010, should upgrade because the 2010 version is no longer officiallly supported by Microsoft. – RobertBaron Jul 03 '19 at 08:20