I am having a look at using Perl to control an Excel spreadsheet: use strict; use warnings; use Win32::OLE qw(in with); use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Excel'; $Win32::OLE::Warn = 3; # die on errors... my $Excel = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('E xcel.Application') Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Applica tion', 'Quit');