Grab text directly from memory in a legacy application?

I was hoping someone could get me started on the right foot with this one. I have an old application that generates an excel like report in a dialog window (a few columns, and several rows of data), but it does not support copy/paste. Would there be a way to write an external application that can get the contents of this report directly from memory? I have a ton of these to do, and doing it all manually, or even with OCR isn't a real efficient solution, as I'd like to automate the extraction of this data. I was hoping there would be a way to get the handle of this dialog window, and then somehow be able to read the contents of it directly from memory or something... I'm not real sure how to approach it. Thanks for any suggestions/help.