Reading the Win32::OLE CP option documentation more carefully, I see why I was confused. It refers to "translations between Perl strings and Unicode strings," but it really means "translations between octets and OLE Unicode strings," doesn't it? Does the CP_UTF8 option mean "strings that are in Perl's internal representation," or should Perl strings be encoded to and decoded from UTF-8 octets when passing data to/from this interface? Thanks.