Decimating Excel files

[gonzlobo]

No, I don't want to destroy them (funny how the word 'decimate' has
changed definition over the years) :).

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.

Thanks in advance.