Many millions of people use “Google” to find things on the web. But 99.9% of them only ever type a simple search string and leave it at that. Sure it works, but it’s like only drive your car in first gear. It’ll get you there but you could do better. Google can do a lot more than most people know.

I recently had to create a simple application at work. The user needed some data dumped into Excel each day so that another system could consume it. It sounded like a 2 minute job. Exporting data to CSV is easy… but when they said Excel they did actually mean the XLS file format. Again, not a big problem. I could easily attach to the Excel COM objects. Piece of cake. However, for the application to run daily I’d need to install and schedule it on a server. The servers don’t have Excel installed so there’s no COM objects to attach to.