regarding speed, I am working with ~90 Excel files, and I am using openpyxl to add about 400-500 cells per WB. On average openpyxl is able to execute this process in just over 10 seconds. Where as opening and closing the excel files as fast as Win32.com can, takes between 50 and 70 seconds, usually towards the latter. I suspect some fragmentation is involved with the speed as this is on an HDD. But there is a significant time delta just refreshing the files. I need to do this because I need to fetch values from openpyxl and if I don't I get NONE even if I open the WB as data_only.