If you want to automate anything on win32 you have to absorb the following knowledge . It mostly consists of learing the ole/excel/powerpoint... object model, and using Win32::OLE to call it or sending messages using guitest. OLE is essentially a fancy/standardised way of sending messages. Its very much like web-scraping, you have to know HTTP/HTML DOM .... the rest is just legwork

• Win32::OLE
• The behavior of Win32::OLE->new
• Using Win32::OLE and Excel - Tips and Tricks
• Automating Windows Applications with Win32::OLE - Perl.com,
• Automated GUI Testing - Perl.com
• Re: perl library for controlling Windows GUI (like AutoIt)
• Re: Write to WIndows Event Log
• Re: How to get location of Desktop folder on Win32
• Read and write Windows "shortcut" links
• Where is the Win32::OLE Docs
• Using Win32::GuiTest
• WinSpy
• OLESPY
• Win32::OLE - Type Library Browser
• http://www.microsoft.com/com/
• OLE/COM Object Viewer (oleview.exe)
• Scriptomatic 2.0
• #develop
• Office Automation with Perl
• How do I convert a VBA macro to Perl?
• OLE withevents site:perlmonks.org
• Excel Object Model Overview
• href://http://www.roth.net/conference/perl/2000/Perl2000.ppt
• http://www.roth.net/conference/perl/1999/ole.ppt