I don't know of any books, smitty, but you might look over in the VB.NET forum (forum796). A lot of us VB people use Office automation all the time and there are lots of posts... and the code should be pretty easy to translate. I personally have done a lot with Excel... I generally use Excel sheets as a reporting tool in my applications, because they're much easier for me to use than Crystal Reports.
If you're already familiar with Office VBA, you might make a lot of headway simply by adding the library reference to your project and foolin' around with it.
Ben
A programmer was drowning. Lots of people watched but did nothing. They couldn't understand why he yelled "F1!"