title: Access Excel Programmatically
body: <p>I am given a huge excel file with a great deal of data and formulas and I need to access the functionality implemented therein to create a web service running on MacOSX. I tried at first to use POI to access its functionality from Java but unfortunately POI does not support some functions like MINVERSE, TRANSPOSE, MMULT and others and I found it particularly difficult to implement them (also see <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10298512/apache-poi-how-to-register-a-function/10306350">this question</a>).</p>
  
  <p>Is there a programmatic way to access the excel sheet? I found RCOMClient for R but it seems it works onl on Windows. Perl, Python, R, Octave, C++, Java or anything if fine provided that it provided full functionality over Excel formulas.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Python Excel</strong>: Why Python Excel in NOT an option for my problem. In the tutorial it is written that:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>A relative reference is useful only if you have external knowledge of
    what cells can be used as the origin. Many formulas found in Excel
    files include function calls and multiple references and are not
    useful, and can be too hard to evaluate. <strong>A full calculation engine is
    not included in xlrd.</strong></p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Unfortunately I need a very good support of the Excel engine.</p>