You are absolutely correct! What happened was that I discovered the Report Generation Toolkit in "modern LabVIEW" (I'd been maintaining a Real Time system coded in LabVIEW 7 running on Windows XP), and once I decided to "jump" to LabVIEW 2012, the need for the convoluted way I was handling Excel simply melted away.
I'm now able to develop LabVIEW code to do "magic" with Excel that runs about 5 times faster, is much simpler to program, much simpler to explain, and uses (almost) no ActiveX.
Bob Schor