Best spreadsheet/DB for text manipulation, AppleScript

[macmesser]

Bringing a site online and need to clean up data in a Quickbooks POS system for the web. The POS system exports products and vendors tables as excel files and they will need to be imported back in afterwards so I'm looking for an application that can import and export excel files and has decent Applescript support. Good text manipulation features and a not too steep entry learning curve a big plus. Products I've considered are Excel Mac, Excel PC, Numbers, Filemaker Pro (db), Proview Panorama (db). I have used the databases and Numbers a bit but I am not a spreadsheet power user and really just think of them as somewhat strange databases. I'm thinking maybe Mac Excel, or would numbers be better? What about Open Office? Any insights or suggestions appreciated.

 

[maflynn]

Excel's VBscript isn't an answer to your problem?

 

[macmesser]

Excel's VBscript isn't an answer to your problem?

Thanks for comment. Are you talking about Excel Mac, Win or both? If Mac, might be a good to have anyway.

Haven't used it but I've used Access dbs and VB seemed to have a lot of stuff dedicated to interface and controls which deterred me from dabbling, and which I don't need now. I'd prefer not to have to learn it for this. Probably overkill and I'm working under time constraint. I'm probably better off using a combination of Applescript and functions, with which I can get by however inelegantly. What I'm trying to do is not fancy. With field or cell inputs replace special characters, test string lengths and existence, truncate, concatenate, conditionally flag those which might be problematic for inspection and possibly manual editing. Simple, but the devil is always in the details.