The managers in many of previous organizations liked Excel. Some of the more Excel-savvy managers would add pivot tables, graphs, and pie charts to the existing spreadsheet and send them to their managers. They could add their own analysis, fine-tuning, and flair to the overall presentation. So began my deep involvement with scripting and Excel.

The floodgates opened, however, when I discovered I could create an instance of Excel and output directly to rows and columns. As it turned out, creating the Excel instance was actually an easy process. I’ll describe the steps of that process, briefly take you through them (covering some basic methods and properties as I go), share selected Excel features that I rely on, and offer some Excel scripting tips.