data scraping

Its possible to scrape with Python but not learn Python. I wouldn't recommend it though since you'll lose out on the ability to control everything, and you'll likely get confused. I would imagine there are some scraping tools out there you can use. wget comes to mind, but it doesn't have a gui. This would help you if you just need a web page or info and don't care about anything else.

The new Python Finance course offers some good exposure to this to get your feet wet.