I made a ruby gem for interacting with excel via remote data queries to a ruby web server, with .iqy file (Excel's terribly query file format) generation and helper methods for parsing dates and times sent as parameters by excel. Once you've got it setup, it lets you query your webserver's data from inside excel.This is my first ruby gem, and I'd love to get your feedback.
http://noahpryor.github.com/excel-data/