MSFT guy here who relates. As a small adjunct project to http://pytools.codeplex.com, we developed some bindings so you can sidestep VBA and use Python with Excel. It works well for what it does. Here's a short video overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi3QKuFugWk . It's OSS/Apache. You don't need VS to use it.
Your post reminded me DataNitro[1] (previously IronSpread), a python-in-excel solution that was featured on HN nearly a year ago[2], and a YCombinator-backed company.
As far as I'm aware it seems closed-source and costly, while your solution is open-source and free. But how does it compare functionality-wise?
At my company we're using using Excel pretty often and python is growing, so using such a tool could be a really convenient.
