Hello! I know that the web is full of questions like this one, but I still haven't been able to apply the answers I can find to my situation. I realize there is VBA, but I always disliked having the program/macro living inside the Excel file, with the resulting bloat, security warnings, etc. I'm thinking along the lines of a VBScript that works on a set of Excel files while leaving them macro-free. Now, I've been able to "paint the first column blue" for all files in a directory following this approach, but I need to do more complex operations (charts, pivot tables, etc.), which would be much harder (impossible?) with VBScript than with VBA. For this specific example knowing how to remove all macros from all files after processing would be enough, but all suggestions are welcome. Any good references? Any advice on how to best approach external batch processing of Excel files will be appreciated. Thanks! PS: I eagerly tried Mark Hammond's great PyWin32 package, but the lack of documentation and interpreter feedback discouraged me.