Ruby: delete columns by name in MS Excel on Windows?

Is there a way to use Ruby to delete columns in an Excel spreadsheet by name (i.e. the value in the first row of the spreadsheet) on a Windows machine?

Background if you want it: I am going to b开发者_StackOverflow中文版e receiving a large number of Excel spreadsheets on a regular basis. Some of these spreadsheets will contain columns that need to be deleted. I will know the names (first-row values) of the columns, but their positions in their respective spreadsheets will change from time to time, so I won't be able to automatically refer to the columns by letter. I would really like to be able to automate this process...

POI is the Apache project to create a library for reading MS Office files; it appears they have Ruby extensions. I have never used it before, but the code looks easy enough to understand. Good luck! Check it out here

You probably want to use the WIN32OLE library, built into the standard library on Windows. There's an example in PickAxe about using Microsoft Excel through the WIN32OLE library, and other examples here. You just need to learn how to use the Excel COM API to make the particular changes you're interested in.