Concise is nice; relevant info is better. The Guidance here is to boil your problematic code down to a minimum (preferably not more than 10 -15 lines) that demonstrates the problem.

Your latest code -- the non-concise form -- gives me an error message; if the same holds true for you, yyou should include that (and any warnings) verbatim, in your post to make it easier for us to help.

That said, here's the way my attempt to run your new code went:

 Directory of D:\_wo_sch # Establishing existance of the file with whi
+ch I tested:

06/28/2013  01:16 PM            56,320 ZBA7-8-13agenda
             

D:\_wo_sch>D:\_Perl_\PMonks\1042932.pl D:\_wo_sch\ZBA7-8-13agenda.doc
Undefined subroutine &main::abs_path called at D:\_Perl_\PMonks\104293
+2.pl line 14.
[download]

So, in a perhaps excessively cursory manner (I'm running out of daylight here for outdoor tasks to be done in the coolth of the evening), I hunted about for a clue about that. Didn't find it (per se), but did find a couple resources which may help you: Re: Using OLE to view given Paragraph in MS Word Document (in Using OLE to view given Paragraph in MS Word Document) and Win32::OLE.

And that leads to another tip. Super Search and Tia Google ( site: www.perlmonks.com <search term(s)> ) can be an source of solace, education and perhaps even solutions and should be resources to which the puzzled resort, early.

And, of course, buried deep (...DEEP!) in perldoc Win32::OLE you'll find another clue.