Most Automation Application will be running when you create an instance of them in your application. The reason being that for most operations to be performed, excel need to be running. This makes things a little complex sometimes. Like trying to do something that pops a dialog box only when certain conditions are met. Then the excel application seems like it is stale, but its waiting for a user to click on the "OK" button of the dialog it just popped. Same applies to most members of MS Office family. So, its a definitive NO, you cannot communicate with Excel without having a running excel.exe COM Automation does require to have an active process. This of it this way: if you start your program 3 times, you will have 3 different Excel applications running, and this is a good thing. You dont want a process intensive task to prevent your 2 other programs to wait when all they do is a simple task each.
