Hi folks,
I'm new to this forum, but hopefully someone has an idea on the below
situation.

First of all, I am not a Windows programmer (VB, VBScript, Visual C++,
ASP, etc). I have written several programs using Unix shell scripting
(bash, sed, grep, etc) that are not really anything more than "find a
string and output that string to an outfile". Over the iterations, I
have upgraded it to write out in a tab delimited format and even
included a cell that totals the contents of column B (included:
=SUM(B1..B300) in my last cell. All along, I have just written the
file as tab delimited plain text with a .xls extension.

I am sensing an upcoming need to explore more of Excel's functions,
like bolding text, writing to different worksheets in the same
workbook, etc. Does anyone know of a resource that explains Excel
file formatting to the degree that I can produce an Excel file as the
output to a simple program?

Many thanks,
Blake Thompson