going over the net

[jms08h]

Hello, I've been a general C++ user for some time now. I've messed around with basic C++ and some windows programming. This summer I'm looking to delve a little deeper.
I'm working an internship and I believe I can automate some of their processes.

I want to write programs that can use and manipulate other Windows programs, specifically Excel and Internet Explorer. I believe learning to use Excel will probably just be a matter of delving deeper into Windows programming. However, I have no idea how to go about learning to work with Internet Explorer. I want to write programs that can log into the company's network and pull data from the site that usually has to be done quite laboriously by hand and paste it into excel and do excel manipulations by hand.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[S6k9GNh0]

1. Create a database, use a database library to access the database, and grab variables from there. I'll be damned if you have to use Internet Explorer to get information off a network.

2. You can use a PHP script to grab variable values from whereever to a database or flat text file and then you can use the database again. This is done ALL the time.

3. You can try and go directly to the values by creating a stream with a library like LibCURL. I've never tried this one before.