What can I use to simplify access to SharePoint lists in VBA?

Hi folks,

I've been writing a ton of VBA macros in Microsoft Project and Excel to access SharePoint lists. They all access the lists.asmx Web Services, and while they work, it's  a real pain to programmatically generate the appropriate XML documents with MSXML, post them to the Web Service as an XMLHttpRequest, and then parse the results.

Is there an easier way to do this? I've seen a lot of documentation concerning the SPWeb class; can I utilize it in VBA?

Is there another way that I haven't thought of?

Pug McThug