Programmatically accessing excel files located on salesforce - salesforce

I am new to the salesforce platform.The task im working on involves some excel files on salesforce. I have to write a program to analyze the data in these excel files and generate a report.I have the following questions about doing this
Do i need to programmatically download these excel files locally to my machine ?. If yes, what api should i use for this ?. An example would be really appreciated.
Is this something that can be done directly on salesforce ?
Thank You.

You have a mutltitude of choices, If you're using .NET or Java, you probably want to start with the soap API, you can run a SOQL query to access the Body field of the document object (I'm assuming you're storing these in documents). The SOAP API docs have examples for this. For other languages you'll probably want to start with the REST API, you'll be able to access the body resource of your document and get back the binary stream, again, good examples in the docs.
No.

Although you can't open an Excel document to inspect it/modify it in Apex (to the best of my knowledge), you can create one - FYI

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