Question: I am fairly new to VB.net and never used it for processing Office files.
Right now I have to look at Excel file and send some emails based on the data in the cells. I do not need to write anything to these files.
So far I have read quite a bit about PIAs and so far it looks that I have to design my application for particular Office version? 
Is there a way to write the application which could handle files created by different versions of MS Excel?
I would like to be able to process these files without Office being installed on the computer at all, is there any way to do it?

Answer: 
You could use Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office [link](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854%28office.14%29.aspx)
you can use

1. [npoi](https://npoi.codeplex.com/)
2. [epplus](http://epplus.codeplex.com/)

which do not require excel