[tmaly]

I have generated thousands of reports in the form of excel spreadsheets. Here are my biggest gripes

1. lack of good meta data so I can process spreadsheets after they have been reviewed. Right now I use named ranges with a keyword but its very limiting.

2. lack of a good build in scripting language that is easily to use, has good 3rd party libraries, and makes automation easy. I am not big on excel macros, it would be nice to have a lua or python built in as an addon.

3. difficult/not straight forward to interact with external data sources. It would be great if I could easily pull data in from a web service. I guess if #2 was there, this might be easier.

[Velox]

Depending on what you are trying to "script" with it, Add-Ins for Office might be good to check out? They are more focused on user interaction rather than scripting currently, but may be useful? They are written using HTML and JavaScript: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/fp142185.asp...

[sankethkatta]

2. Checkout Data Nitro (YC S12) https://datanitro.com/ It allows you to script excel with Python.