Request: Official Method to Identify Excel Edition (2016, 365, 2024) Without Registry

Question

Hi Office Development Team,

I am working on a VBA/COM-based solution that requires detecting the installed edition of Microsoft Excel on a user’s system specifically identifying whether the user has Excel 2016, Excel 365, or Excel 2024.

After exploring available documentation and community discussions, it seems:

1. Application.Version always returns 16.0 for Excel 2016 and newer.
2. WMI via Win32_Product is unreliable or incomplete for Click-to-Run installations.
3. File version metadata (EXCEL.EXE) does not explicitly expose the edition (only a numeric build).
4. Registry-based methods are not permitted in our deployment.

Our goal is to programmatically retrieve something like:

"Microsoft Excel 365" or "Excel 2024"

Is there a Microsoft-supported way via WMI, COM, Office API, or another official interface to directly determine the installed Excel edition (2016, 365, 2024, etc.) without parsing version numbers or reading the registry?

We appreciate your time and any insights you can provide.

Regards,

Sathish.V.