On one hand, I agree with you and I personally prefer to use Win32::OLE to control Excel when trying to manipulate Excel files when on a Windows system that has Excel installed.

However, I would urge caution about leveraging macros, which is what I think that you're referring to when you mention "VB script". To make a long story short, apparently there was a situation at my job some time prior to when I started where a macros in an Excel file got infected by a virus and was deleting "random" files on our file server whenever that macros was run. I don't have all of the details on what happened there. Also, there's a reason that Microsoft's latest versions of Office has macros disabled by default.

Not disagreeing with you on anything, but just wanted to pass on a word of caution.