Decimating Excel files

[jean-michel bain-cornu]

Hi,
> We have a data acquisition program that saves its output to Excel's
> ..xls format. Unfortunately, the programmer was too stupid to write
> files the average user can read.
> 
> I'd like some advice on how to go about:
> 1. Reading a large Excel file and chop it into many Excel files (with
> only 65535 lines per file)
> or
> 2. Decimate an Excel file & write... say every other line (user
> selectable)... to a new file.
> 
> I'm pretty experienced at reading and writing simple text files, but
> this is my first foray into using COM. I would imagine either choice 1
> or 2 is pretty simple once I can get the file open.
When I have Excel stuff to do, I use :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyexcelerator
May be it can cover your needs ?
 From my point of view, COM is something to avoid : no docs, lot of 
investigations, weak results.
Regards
jm