Excel VBO (Interop) won't work without excel installed. When you use it, excel is started in background anyway, but is kept invisible, unless you excplicitly use Show action.
If you requirement is to do lookup in excel file without actually running excel, you have few options, they depend on excel file version:
1) OleDB. That might still need full Office or Office Data Connectivity Components installed.
2) Use some external library to read excel files (decent ones are commercial, mileage may vary).
3) Parse OOXML(.xlsx) yourself - the hard way.
