VB 2008 Read From Excel 2007 Spreadsheet?

I have an Excel 2007 spreadsheet with data about my golf group, e.g., each row has name, phone number, handicap, etc.I want to write a VB 2008 application to read each row, extract the appropriate column data, and then print it out. I can't find any help on how to do it.

For example, I thought I'd have to go to the references and add the Microsoft Excel 12.0 object, then import Microsoft.office.interop Once done, my thought on a simple line of code to just display the A1 box would be:

dim appExcel as New Excel.Application
dim variable as string
variable = appExcel.range ("a1").value
message.box(variable)

Running that results in an error exception. So I'm clueless. Any hints or pointers on what to do, especially how to contruct a loop to read the contents of each column in each row, process and move to the next row.