I have some applications written to use MS office COM. Specifically Excel. Everything was working nice and dandy until today. Because some time ago I decided to permanently move to open office and hence uninstalled MS Office. And today I had to use an application that was using the ms office OLE objects.
A little search found the solution. Transparent and without needing to rewrite/re-compile your applications:
AutomateIt: http://sourceforge.net/projects/automateit/
Just install and you’re ready to OLE.