A mostly forgotten these days aspect of Office is that you can access pretty much everything in it using COM - including both extending and embedding Excel, whe

A mostly forgotten these days aspect of Office is that you can access pretty much everything in it using COM - including both extending and embedding Excel, where you get full control over the data inside the spreadsheet. And even with just VBA, I've seen some impressive spreadsheet applications (in fact, some even were versioned and had official SDLC process in some companies).