Spreadsheets are one of the most versatile and omnipresent tools in the world of computing. Their intuitive approach of sheets and cells is used by virtually everyone that uses a computer as part of their day-to-day operations. There's even a joke that whole complex businesses are managed and described in a single spreadsheet. They are an incredibly powerful tool.

That makes the ability to automate reading from and writing to spreadsheets so powerful. We'll see in this chapter how to process spreadsheets, mainly in the most common format, Excel. A final recipe will cover a free alternative, Libre Office, and in particular, how to use Python as a scripting language inside it.