External program to phyton

hello,
Ive just started learning phyton this week so the question might be silly .
i have in mind one program that i really want to write(this is the reason tham i am learning). I want to make sure that i can do the 2 following things:
1. read from xml page every hour.
2. input the results to external program(the display of the results very important to me, and i want to show them in graphs).
Actually Excel is excellent for this beside the fact it cant read the xml automatic. Do you know any good external program for this(maybe i can input the results to excel)?
thank you and sorry for my English.

python can do these things.

the threading has a timer that can start a function at hourly intervals.

python can parse xml files. http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/pyexpat.html

python can draw graphs....many libraries exist.