In Access a reference can be added to the current database by calling the AddFromFile method of the References collection. The following, for example would add a reference to the Adobe Acrobat type library:
Application.References.AddFromFile("C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\acrobat.tlb")
I'm not very familiar with the Excel object model, but I assume you could do similar in Excel from Access through automation, by first creating a reference to the Excel file in the current database and then returning a reference to it in code in order to call the above method.