>>This paragraph was specifically about Office automation. With every new version there would be some feature deprecated, or some brand new dialog which still showed up even though the general setting to suppress them was set. Probably the setting isn't respected at class level (do they use classes at all? :), they don't have a rule, they have a list - so the latest additions don't get on the list.
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>I get that, but what I'm saying is that there is no difference between doing it from .NET or Fox **if you use dynamic access via late binding**.
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>If they change the Office API's that'll break in any type of environment, not just in .NET and that's a different story of course.
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>But I agree nevertheless. While the .NET Office Automation SDKs are very nice, they have to be kept up to date with specific versions and **those are tightly coupled to very specific versions of Office** so using a different version of Office is likely to break it.
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>For all that though - I have to say I have a few heavy office automation tasks (producing docs and pdfs, from HTML content and to my surprise that code that was written with Office 2007 (?) still works today with Office 365. So while there certainly is some churn in some areas, a good cross section of the tools remain compatible over versions.

That's been my experience also.
I bought Tamar and Della Martin's book on Office Automation for VFP almost 20 years ago.
I still refer to it occasionally when doing automation from VFP or .NET.
The Excel spreadsheet has become a preferred way of sharing financial data and if you're dealing with people who handle money, Office Automation is a useful tool.