• That's a whole lot of reading to get one questions. Not really needed. Executing:
    sp_configure 'Ad Hoc Distributed Queries'
    Will tell you if Ad Hoc Distributed Queries is enabled
    You really don't need to follow advice in every link as they are all doing different things. There was no need to grant ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS permission - if you read the links you referred to it says: OPENROWSET permissions are determined by the permissions of the user name that is being passed to the OLE DB provider. To use the BULK option requires ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS permission.
    You aren't doing a bulk operations at this time, just a query.

    But in all of that writing over and over, you never did answer the second questions. You just need to execute the following:
    EXEC master.dbo.sp_MSset_oledb_prop N'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0'

    No offense but you seem to be totally lost on all of this. It would be better for you to understand linked servers, linked server properties, providers - what they are and how they play a part in all of this, what the provider and linked server settings need to be for different options, etc. If you don't get your head around that you can't support the linked server. After you understand more of what linked servers are and how they work and need to be configured, you can walk through an Excel linked server in this article:
    Excel Import to SQL Server using Linked Servers

    Sue