General information about licensing and using Office XP Web Components

This article discusses the licensing and use of Microsoft Office XP Web Components.

If you create a Web page that contains a Microsoft Office XP Web component, the Office XP Web component is not visible to visitors to your site unless they install Office XP Web Components. If the following conditions are true, the visitor is licensed to fully interact with the Web components:

• The visitor has a valid license for Microsoft Office XP
• Office XP Web Components is installed on the visitor's computer

If the visitor does not have a valid license for Office XP, but installs Office XP Web Components, the visitor is licensed for static, non-interactive use of the Office XP Web components only. If the visitor does not have a valid Office XP license and does not install the Office XP Web Components, the visitor cannot see the Office XP Web components at all.

Licensing

Office XP Web Components have the following licensing requirements:

• Static, non-interactive, client-side, view-only mode use of the Excel object, PivotTable object, and Charting object in the Office XP Web Components does not require a license to Microsoft Office. Use of the Office Data Source Component cannot be achieved in a static, non-interactive, client-side, view only mode and is not permitted without a license to Microsoft Office XP.
• Interactive use of the Office XP Web Components program requires a valid license for Office XP (or a later version of Office that includes the Office XP Web Components program) for each access device, such as a personal computer, that accesses or uses the Office XP Web Components program on the client-side or on a remote a server. Interactive use requires any device that accesses or uses the Office XP Web Components program remotely on a server to be licensed to run interactively, regardless of usage type.

Design-time and run-time interactive

Interactive access and use of the Office XP Web Components program lets the user input data into the user interface of the Office XP Web component and use the tools to design the Office XP Web components. The interactive licensing requirements are specified in the "Licensing" section. The following list contains examples of interactive access and use of the Office XP Web Components program:

• Use of the settings of the Commands and Options dialog box
• Changing the data or structure of the Office XP Web components
• Use of a script to respond to user events

Run-time static

Generally, non-interactive access and use means that the user does not input data into the Office XP Web component or change data in the Office XP Web component. Non-interactive access and use is frequently sufficient. The following list contains examples of non-interactive access and use:

• Accessing the About and Help dialog boxes from the toolbar
• Viewing the data
• Printing the data
• Selecting and scrolling the data
• Use of hyperlinks in the data
• Resizing the Office XP Web component
• Use of sheet selection
• Use of expand and collapse functionality where available
• Refreshing data

The following list contains examples which do not represent non-interactive access and use:

• Accessing the Commands and Options dialog box.
• Changing the data or structure of the Office XP Web components. For example, typing inside any one of the cells when you view an Office Spreadsheet component.
• Use of any buttons on the component toolbar except the About and Help buttons.

License checking

A valid Office license is required to run the Office XP Web Components program in fully interactive mode. The version of the Office XP Web Components program that released with Office XP (Microsoft Office XP Web Components version 10) had license checking code that checked for the installation of Office. If Office was not present on the computer, the Office XP Web Components program would run in a reduced functionality mode. Specifically, the Office XP Web Components program would run in static mode.

This license checking mechanism posed challenges for programs that tried to integrate with the Office XP Web Components program. Additionally, many customers own an Office license for all computers, but they do not install Office on every computer. This fact resulted in confusing differences in the Office XP Web Components program runtime behavior because some computers would run in fully interactive mode whereas others would run in static mode.

With the release of Microsoft Office 2003, the license checking code in Office XP Web Components program version 10 was removed to address these issues. Customers who installed Office 2003 or downloaded an updated version of the Office XP Web Components version 10 program after the release of Office 2003 will no longer have the license checking. Users who were running in static mode before the license checking code was removed will now see the interactive controls. Although the license checking code was removed and additional controls may be active, the End User License Agreement for all versions of the Office XP Web Components program remains the same.

Availability

• The Office XP Web Components program is available in the following products:
  • All Microsoft Office XP editions
  • Microsoft Access 2002
  • Microsoft Excel 2002
  • Microsoft FrontPage 2002
  If you install one of these products, the Office XP Web Components program is automatically installed, by default, on the computer.
• You can also install the Web components by running Setup.exe in the \Files\OWC folder on any Office XP installation source (CD-ROM or administrative installation).
• The Office XP Components program is also available from the following Microsoft Web sites:
  Office XP Web Components Add Analysis Tools to Your Web Page (http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/oWebComp1.aspx)
  
  Office XP Web Components: Pivot Table Lists (http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/oWebComp2.aspx)
  
  Office XP Web Components: Spreadsheets (http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/oWebComp3.aspx)
  
  Office XP Web Components: Charts (http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/oWebComp4.aspx)
  
  Office XP Web Components: The Data Source Component (http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/oWebComp5.aspx)

Remember that if you download and install the Office XP Web Components program from the Microsoft Download Center and you do not have a valid Office XP license, you are not licensed for interactive use of the Office XP components. This means that you cannot perform any design-time work with the controls, and when you locate a Web page that contains an Office XP Web component, you can only view the data

You may install the Office XP Web Components program either directly from a Microsoft Web site, from the Microsoft Office CD, or other relevant Microsoft Office media distributed by Microsoft. You may also install from an intranet installation point in a corporation or other legal entity, provided the corporation or legal entity makes sure that they are in compliance with the licensing requirements set forth earlier. Distribution of the Office XP Web Components program, other than what is provided in this paragraph, is strictly forbidden. For more information about how to install and deploy the Office XP Web Components, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: