You can choose to learn how to do it yourself _ or call in someone(an Excel VB Solutions Developer for instance) who knows how. Again, this would be dependent on your purpose, how proficient you are, and/or how much time you have at your disposal. Ultimately, even if someone develops a custom application for you, it should happen with YOUR guidance at every point to ensure that it does EXACTLY what you want it to do, and that you can easily _ with your developer's support/coaching _ learn how to make modifications to it in future, without needing to call back your developer.
I believe using either of these two applications should not pose any problems for implementing your spreadsheet automation ideas. This is because both have always been "friendly", towards making it easy for users to get more functionality out of them by way of custom programming.
Variable Costs Control/Reduction was a strategy that worked extremely well for the company. Most memorable for me as a brewer, was the manner in which huge monetary savings/profit gains were made by successfully implementing variable cost reduction initiatives. For instance, a brewing ingredient switch was made to a more readily available local alternative which was many times cheaper, resulting in phenomenal savings and progressively increasing profit earnings even though the price of beer produced was not raised. This practice was routinely applied across the brewing and packaging processes in line with a well thought out plan.
From this point on, I will refer to only one of the above mentioned applications, because it is my preferred work environment. That is Microsoft Excel. I believe users of other spreadsheet applications will be able to adapt whatever I say from here for use in their own peculiar environments.