Best How To :

I think this will also work for Visual Basic [for Applications]; I tried it in Excel VBA and Word VBA:

In VBA Development Environment, select Tools, References. In the list that now appears, check the Object Model you need. In your case you will want to check the Microsoft Excel 12.0 Object Library.

You now have access to the complete Excel Object Model in your application and can open and manipulate an Excel spreadsheet file as you need.

The following code in VB for Word opens an Excel Spreadsheet and gets the value of the first cell:

Sub ExcelTestInWord()
    Dim oExcel As Object
    Dim wb As Object
    Dim v

    'Declare a variable as a FileDialog object.
    Dim fd As FileDialog
    Dim vrtSelectedItem As Variant

    Set oExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")

    'Create a FileDialog object as a File Picker dialog box.
    Set fd = Application.FileDialog(msoFileDialogFilePicker)
    If (fd.Show = -1) Then
        For Each vrtSelectedItem In fd.SelectedItems
            Set wb = oExcel.Workbooks.Open(vrtSelectedItem)
            v = wb.Sheets(1).Cells(1).Value
            wb.Close
        Next vrtSelectedItem
    End If

End Sub