Perl is excellent at dealing with Excel spreadsheets. I have a number of automation tools on Windows which run under Windows Task Scheduler and extract data from one or more spreadsheet. One is a GUI application that interfaces with Xero to help with our company's accounting.

Much of the power of Perl is CPAN which is a rich repository for Perl modules written by the Perl community. As Perl has been around for a long time, so there are a lot of very stable modules available to you. For example, to handle spreadsheets I use Spreadsheet::Read to work with spreadsheets and GD::Graph for producing real time graphs in a variety of formats.

The other advantage of a mature language is the support that is available as I am sure you have already discovered here in the Monastery.