Programmatically accessing excel files located on salesforce

Question

I am new to the Salesforce platform. The task I'm 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

1. 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.

2. Is this something that can be done directly on salesforce?

Thank You.

Answer 1

1. Since you have multiple choices, if you're using .NET or JAVA, you'd probably want to start off with SOAP API. For this, you can run a SOQL query in order to access the Body field of the document object.

2.No.