I am creating a Python script where it does a bunch of tasks and one of those tasks is to launch and open an instance of Excel. What is the ideal way of accomplishing that in my script?

解决方案

While the Popen answers are reasonable for the general case, I would recommend win32api for this specific case, if you want to do something useful with it:

It goes something like this:

from win32com.client import Dispatch

xl = Dispatch('Excel.Application')

wb = xl.Workbooks.Open('C:\\Documents and Settings\\GradeBook.xls')

xl.Visible = True # optional: if you want to see the spreadsheet

Taken from a mailing list post but there are plenty of examples around.