Analyze Text to find patterns and useful information
Try xlrd Python Module to read and process excel sheets.
I think an appropriate implementation using this module is an easy way to solve your problem.
to provide some context: Issues in an application are logged in an excel sheet and one of the columns in that sheet contains the email communication between the user (who had raised the issue) and the resolve team member. There are bunch of other columns containing other useful information. My job is to find useful insights from this data for Business.

Find out what type of issue was that? e.g. was that a training issue for the user or access issue etc. This would mean that I analyze the mail text and figure out by some means the type of issue.
How many email conversations have happened for one issue?
Is it a repeat issue?
There are other simple statistical problems e.g. How many issues per week etc...

I read that NLP with Python can be solution to my problems. I also looked at Rapidminer for the same.
Now my Question is 
a. "Am I on the right track?, Is NLP(Natural Language Processing) the solution to these problems?"
b. If yes, then how to start.. I have started reading book on NLP with Python, but that is huge, any specific areas that I should concentrate on and can start my analysis?
c. How is Rapidminer tool? Can it answer all of these questions? The data volume is not too huge (may be 100000 rows)... looks like it is quite easy to build a process in rapidminer, hence started on it...
Appreciate any suggestions!!!