Opening Office Documents

Question

Is there a simple way to open Word and Excel documents in VB.NET for basic data extraction, without using COM to open instances of Word and/or Excel? I basically want to have a program that runs on a file server which traverses various directories and looks for meta-data files that describe the data within those directories. Those meta-data files may be written in Word, Excel, XML or plain text, and I want to write a program which can build a master database out of all those files. The program needs to open a Word file, for example, and traverse its objects, but the trick is that the machine running it won't have Office installed on it. Any ideas where I could look? Thanks! Aaron Edwards