Yes I think Python is a great choice for this of application. I used to use perl for this kind of thing but once you establish a framework for what you are doing it's easier to grow and maintain it in python. Perl's advantage is that is has a built in reporting capability and a larger public library of modules but Python's contributed library is quite good and you can usually find what you need. One paradigm I often use is to write python scripts to process tab delimited data and then use Excel as a reporting and analytical engine. I take the raw data in as tab separated rows and then output it the same way. If your raw data is in Excel you can even use the clipboard to get it out run a python script in amand shell to transform it send that result to the clipboard then switch back to Excel and paste the results into a new worksheet. With Excel pivot tables you can summarize the transformed data as a crosstab or present it as a chart. I don't bother to try and do that kind of stuff in python. Of course you could write the transformation code in VB within Excel but I always found python to be much easier especially with the help of libraries. I work on Windows so I use a freemand shell called tcc (from JO Software) that has a built-in clipboard device that allows piping from my python script to or from the clipboard. Python has an excellentmand-line arguments processor so I make frequent use of that to provide options in the transformation and reporting logic within my script. There are also libraries for direct access to Excel workbooks database access etc. tabular data management etc. Also for generating HTML which is another good option for your report output.