I was thinking about posting the same question when I came across your post. I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to do, but I have had some success with Ruby and Excel. I find that if you can create an Excel macro that does something similar to what you would like Ruby to do, you can more or less 'rubyfy' the macro code and access all the same methods and attributes in your Ruby code. I was able to figure out how to get Ruby to create Excel graphs, and cell color coding this way. If the software you want to interact with has a similar macroing tool, you may be able to work out how to use ruby to interact with that software. I do look forward to the book that Mike mentioned.
