I'm aware of at least two possibilities for reading directly from xls files: - Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel - Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0 OleDB provider From what little information I've been able to find on the subject, it seems that the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel method requires that Excel be installed on the system where this will be run. Is this true? Basically, I want a reliable (read: can be run on any system Windows 7 or higher with or without office installed) to read data from an XLS or XLSX spreadsheet. I don't need to do any writing to the format, I just need to read from it and dump the data into a SQLite or SQL Server Compact database table. Are there any methods other than those two I mentioned, and which would be the highest recommended method of doing what I need? Thanks.