I’ve recently taken it as a project to teach myself how to program in Python. Overall, I must say that I’m impressed with it.
In the past I’ve typically stuck to programming in VBA mostly for MS Excel (but also a bit in MS Access and Word) and have struggled to find ways to make it do things that Python can easily do with a single command.
I was wondering if there were a reasonable way to harness the programming power and ease of Python while at the same time make use of the various tools in Office (mostly Excel)?
There is a set of cross platform Python utilities – called xlrd, xlwt, and xlutils – for reading & writing Excel files. There are some limitations (e.g. I don’t think they can process macros), but they do allow you to work with Excel files on non-Windows platforms, if that’s of use to you. See: http://www.python-excel.org/
Also, there are SO questions already dealing with this sort of topic, including this:
Is there a better way (besides COM) to remote-control Excel?