excel in/on dialog box

[jim enright]

what am i missing?

have gone through countless searches in this forum and google. i want to do the following:

create an mfc dialog based app that treats excel like a grid control in that
an excel workbook is placed on the dialog box (preferably through a drag and drop procedure) and employ basic cell i/o operations.

articles such as http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311546: (How to embed and automate an Excel worksheet by using MFC and Visual C++ 2005 or Visual C++ .NET) are typical of the off point material i find:

1. they are not written for dialog based apps

2. i interpret automation to mean control and embedding to make excel
a child object to the dialog so that click events can alter the excel sheet
cell values visible on the dialog - the articles i see seem to make no distinction

3. the article actually provides compilable code - something i rarely find ms
capable of doing (the article above is a case in point: does not provide
what i want and does not compile)

am using vs2005 vc++

appreciate any insight. thx in advance -