I'm working on an application that is going to replace a rather large spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is used to budget purchases and things like that. It is the largest spreadsheet I have ever seen, and it required a lot of manual data entry, so this application is going to automate much of that.

But as I'm working on this I've noticed its slow going. And I got to thinking this must be a common thing to do many companies will start with something like a spreadsheet, then when they get too big to maintain that, they will get a custom application built. So is there anything out there ( a framework or similar ) that does this sort of thing, migrating a spreadsheet to a custom application.

I've had a quick Google but not really seen the kind of thing that I'm looking for.

It's too late for this project, but I thought it would be worth having a look for next time.

How do you guys tackle this problem?