Look at Druid or Imply

Xataface is pretty quick and easy. Xataface.com

somewhat related - excerpt from Cryptonomicon - The percussionist stands up. "Every radio operator has a distinctive style of keying—we call it his fist. With a bit of practice, our Y Service people can recognize different German operators by their fists—we can tell when one of them has been transferred to a different unit, for example."

and this article by Schneier - Identifying People By Their Writing Style - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/identifying_p...

This made me recall Meilir Page-Jones' book "Practical Project Management" from way back...

"Second, employees who are truly competent and are eager to make a genuine contribution to the department soon resign from a mediocracy, leaving behind them the dross of nonproducers and internecine warriors. I term this effect the Inverse Gresham’s Law: A mediocracy hoards mediocre people and drives good people into general circulation."

http://www.waysys.com/book-excerpts/ppm-ch15.html

Maybe something like civicrm would give you more ideas/starting point? https://civicrm.org/

https://www.overviewproject.org/ Read and analyze thousands of documents super quickly. Full text search, topic modeling, coding and tagging, visualizations and more. All in an easy-to use, visual workflow.

I've always liked this page - http://www.vendian.org/envelope/

and the dots clock is interesting as well

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565926219 - Python Programming on Win32 has some good info and some stories on "batch processing" of office docs. Good case study on "Applied Biometrics" capturing of drug testing process. I've used the py/com stuff to do some of what you want - build xls files with "macros" for calculations, etc. You have the option of doing it in python or inserting the excel code into cells. You can also find other "excel" controls for python that create csv file versions of spreadsheets (so likely none of the macro capabilities) - same for perl, etc