[Tutor] question regarding windows extensions and excel spreadhseets.

[Thomas CLive Richards]

Hi again ;)

I've been putting this off for too long now, but I need to do some
python/windows programming. the only trouble is that I have no idea
about where to start.

I have a program which generate some eight data every now and again.
What i need to do is to be able to append this to an excel spreadsheet,
while the spreadsheet is open on the users desktop. I have heard that
you can do this with Visual Basic, So I'm guessing you can do it with
the windows extensions too, right?

When looking at www.python.org/windows/ I ran into my first problem...

what's the difference between the win32 and win32com packages? which one
should i use for my application? Ideally i should be able to write a
smallish function which takes numerical input, and spits it at the excel
spreadsheet.. can this be done easily? what packages/modules/functions
should I be investigating?

I can't remember the last time i used windows, and ideally I'd like to
keep my time using windows as short as possible...

finally, although as a bit of an "aside", is there a module which
performs a similar task to the above, but under Linux? I'm guessing
it'd be application specific, so you'd have to do things differently
depending on whether you were using gnumeric, kspread or openoffice,
right?

thanks for the tips ;)

-- 

Thomi Richards,
thomi@thomi.imail.net.nz