Several very good observations from other posters, but why make this project any harder than it needs to be? KISS!!!!!! You seem to already know VBA. Why not write a VBA add-in for Excel to import the data, and then do the analysis/consolidation using Excel macros. Excel generates good graphs and can do high level statistics including multiple regression with an inexpensive add-in such as WinStat. http://www.winstat.com/ IMNSHO learning a new language just for this task is gross over-kill. After you extract the data, you will still need to format and analyze. Most likely you will have to use another program/language such as “R”on top of one of the dialects of C. What exactly will one of the new “hot” languages do that VBA or even Quick Basic won't?

This seems to be more of a problem because "programming" is intangible. It is difficult to imagine a building contractor not billing for a change order on a customer's whim, particularly when this involves ripping out work that was already done which is fully functional. Much of this appears to occur because of the failure to implement well known and time tested principles of project management such as adequately defining a project to avoid moving targets and attempting to nail the jelly to the tree. In many cases when the customer realizes they are paying for the changes they keep requiring, in money and/or delivery date slip, their changes stop. Another significant problem, unless the project is properly modularized/packaged and rigidly controlled, is that non-productive activities/enhancements tend to creep in. Programming is a creative activity, and it is difficult to avoid adding "flourishes" which add nothing to the product functionality, and which only the programmer will notice, for example writing a subroutine that is available as a library function so the program is smaller or runs [marginally] faster. User interfaces are another creative trap prone to introduce endless tinkering. In many cases "good enough" is indeed good enough.

OpenOffice or Libre. Government should have made the switch years ago. Many state and local governments already have. State of Kansas where I live for example. Unka_George

Your points are well taken. Developers are stuck with the "change for the sake of change" model, but users are not. For example, replace M$ Office with FOSS OpenOffice or Libre Office, replace Exploder with FireFox, etc. Even the operating system can be replaced with FOSS such as Ubuntu. It is not at all clear to me why IT and Accounting are not leading the charge to replace M$ with FOSS if only to escape the never ending cosmetic upgrades and the resulting training costs and loss in productivity because of the user "learning curve," which in many cases exceeds the licensing/rental costs. The collateral costs of peripherals that will not work with the new O/S version are also significant. Unka_George