This is for self education really. But, is there an easier way to read from an excel sheet, without using the COM/INTEROP DLLs? Any other way Microsoft makes it easier to read values from an excel sheet cell by cell(And word by word in Word)?
For Word & Excel a good 3rd party library is Aspose http://www.aspose.com/.net/total-component.aspx Aspose provides a very easy to use API with a plethora of options to manipulate word and excel documents. The documentation is also good. That said the licensing fees might be prohibitive.
If you want open-source alternatives for Word there is DocX http://docx.codeplex.com/ DocX provides a nice API over OpenXML.
We have made some major extensions to DocX in an unofficial branch that you may find useful: https://github.com/organizations/Word-DocX
The list of extensions include support for single and multilevel lists, support for reading font-formatting, section/section-breaks etc.