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I need to develop & deploy Excel applications using MapPoint's ActiveX Controls. I have successfully done so using Excel XP and VBA a couple of years ago. Then I upgraded to Excel 2003 and found myself in a bind. My specific questions are, and I would really appreciate if anyone can help me with these questions one by one please:

(1) Is there any way I can re-intall Office XP's Packaging Wizard with my Office 2003 to develop, deploy and package my original Excel/VBA solutions, without having to re-install all of Office XP ? I saw an MS Access Deployment Wizard on MSDN, but I don't see anything for Excel, any ideas ?

(2) Will packaging my Excel/VBA solution with a commercial digital certificate remove this annoying Security warning every time my users open my deployed Excel solution ? I hope my Excel/VBA solutions can still work on Excel XP and above, is this a correct assumption ?

Then I thought maybe it is time for me to move on to Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003 (VSTO), which lead me to even bigger hurdles to jump over. I use Visual Studio.Net 2003 extensively for web applications, but VSTO for Excel is so convoluted for me and I could not find a decent refernce to guide me through its complexities. My questions are:

(3) I cannot even get VSTO to simply display and control a MapPoint Object in Excel !! I think it has to do with COM Interop, but I am not sure. Can anyone please send me a VSTO Sample Solution with the proper COM Interop references and code to simply display a map in Excel for a street address the user enters in Excel ?

(4) If I go with VSTO, does that mean I am forcing my users to only use Excel 2003 ? Do I need to worry about Digital Certificates as was the case in (2) above ?

Thank you very much,

Aladdin Nassar
anassar@yahoo.com