Speaking from experience with attempting to gui-manage/automate MS Office programs in perl - I'd suggest you dont do it, unless you already have MS app automation experience.

Instead, (much as I hate M$), I'd recommend doing it in Excel's built-in VBA - which will provide much-needed object propery/method expansion , and GUI building tools (perhaps netbeans does this for you).

In perl - you will absolutely need to install modules to get this to work - and there will be a considerable learning curve.

Cheers, and good luck.