Answer
BRES requires a genuine retail/volume-licensed Excel Professional installation (2016 or 2019) — a Microsoft 365 subscription-based Excel installation doesn't work for this purpose. It runs fine on Windows Server 2016, though getting the configuration right can be fiddly and is worth following the technical documentation closely. The bigger caveat: BRES relies on server-side Automation of Excel, which Microsoft explicitly does not recommend or support running unattended/non-interactively on a server — Office applications can become unstable or deadlock in that kind of environment, and in practice this shows up as BRES intermittently stopping report rendering because the underlying Excel process crashes. This is a fundamental limitation of automating Office on a server rather than a specific IFS bug, so it's worth weighing this reliability risk before committing to BRES if a viable alternative reporting approach exists.