title: .NET Deploying Office 2003 Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies (o2003pia.msi)
body: <p>Has anyone out there actually succeeded in creating a prerequisitie for o2003.msi?</p>
  
  <p>There are a <em>lot</em> of people out there asking about this, but I cannot find anyone who actually succeeded. I find some extremely complicated solutions where you are required to comple .cpp-files for which the soure may or may not be supplied. I even tried to complie one of those but got configuration error on the target machine... :-(</p>
  
  <p>If I don't install o2003.msi, my Office "Shared Add-In" will throw an exception because office.dll cannot be found. So I would very much like to have it included in my installer.</p>
  
  <p>And a second question, regardless of the outcome of the previous one: what about a machine with Office 2007? 02203.msi complains that Office 2003 is not installed, so there seems to be a lot of things I need to get done in order to create a working installer for an "Office Shared Add-In"... anyone else going through the same nightmare?</p>
  
  <p>Update: It seems to be the PIA for Office.Core / "office.dll" which is the really thing to get on the traget machine. None of the "complicated" solutions (which I know I can get to work if I put some effort in it) talks how to detect this particular file, just PIAs for Word &amp; Excel and then some. These seems to be in place anyway. It's office.dll that is the important file to check for and install o2003pia.msi if it is not properly installed!</p>