LabVIEW Executable Built with Microsoft 365 Will Not Run on Other Computers

Issue Details

I developed a LabVIEW program that uses the Report Generation Toolkit to interact with Microsoft Office. My development computer has Office 365 on it and everything works when I run the program on that computer. However, when I build an executable and deploy it to computers running earlier versions of Microsoft Office, the executable will not run properly or throws access violation errors. What is happening and how do I fix it?

Solution

LabVIEW's Report Generation Toolkit detects the version of Microsoft Office that is installed on the development computer and installs the appropriate Active X Object Model to interact with the software.

Microsoft changed its underlying Active X Object Model for Office 365, which means an executable that is built on a computer running Office 365 will not be able to communicate with earlier versions of Office. Similar issues will be seen in software that is not LabVIEW. 

In order to overcome this issue, the development machine and the run-time computers will need to be running consistent versions of Microsoft Office. Either upgrade the run-time computers to Microsoft Office 365, or build the executable on a computer that has an earlier version of Microsoft Office that matches the version on the run-time computer.

Additional Information

This issue is similar to the problem that was seen between Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Office 2000. 

In some cases, the installation of this driver has allowed applications developed pre-Office 365 to run on Office 365 products.