VB 6.0 and Excel objects

I am in the process of teaching myself Visual Basic (I know, I know…I’m a weenie) as a kind of on-the-job training project. I’m writing a program that tracks data across a variety of analytical instruments. So far, so good.

For reasons I won’t bore you with, at one stage the user will have to open and edit a textfile; this will really involve simple cut-and paste, copy, and fill-down operations, and I thought using an excel-like control would work nicely.

I have searched MSDN, all three of the “VB-for absolute nincompoops” books I’ve bought, the SDMB General questions forum," and am no closer to answering what should be an extremely simple task.

I can slap an Excel worksheet into a form; no problem. My question is how do I get the text from the text file and into the spreadsheet? And once it’s been edited to the user’s liking, how do I get it out? I’ve looked at the “OLE/COM” portion of my texts, but this seems much more involved and complex than what I need to do.

Any help greatly appreciated.