MSFT guy here who relates. As a small adjunct project to http://pytools.codeplex.com, we developed some bindings so you can sidestep VBA and use Python with Excel. It works well for what it does. Here's a short video overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi3QKuFugWk . It's OSS/Apache. You don't need VS to use it.