Do you understand the change you have made to $VAR1? You have replaced the string 'user.firstName' with a reference to an array containing only one element (the original string). The error message you reported in your chatterbox message is exactlly what you should expect if you made only this change to my script. Note that my for $var loop no longer makes much sense because all the values no longer have the same structure. Use hippo's method to dereference just the two required values.

Now show us your best effort to put these two values into your spread sheet.