If you have access to the Report Generation Toolkit (included in the LabVIEW "base" starting with LabVIEW 2014), this is (in my opinion) by far the easier (and better) way to go for doing 95% of the things you want to do linking LabVIEW and Excel.
We use Excel Workbooks to "program" behavioral studies of (human) sound localization. Each row corresponds to a Trial, with about 100 parameters (timing, placement of the sound source, nature of the sound stimulus, production of other sound and visual stimuli during the trial, plus a limited set of "outcome measures") defining each trial. When we first developed this system (with LabVIEW 7.0), ActiveX was the way you linked LabVIEW and Excel. It was tricky, relatively slow (it might take a second to read and parse a row, particularly if reading and writing was involved), and a pain to maintain and modify.
About 3 years ago, we began a complete rewrite of this code using "modern" LabVIEW, including using the revised Report Object-based Report Generation Toolkit. It now takes a few hundredths of a second to read/write a row, the code is much simpler and much more flexible, and was much easier to develop.
I believe ActiveX is no longer in active support or development by Microsoft. I certainly know that when we migrated to Windows 7, I had a difficult time finding the appropriate Help files that would let me know what all those "interesting" ActiveX functions were and how they worked (I did eventually find the information). What the story with Windows 8 and 10 are, I don't know.
As far as examples go, there are also numerous examples on the Forum doing Excel things with the Report Generation Toolkit (I posted a number of them, myself). So that's my $0.02 worth of opinion.
Bob Schor
