To get it into a variable, I used both strptime, then passed that variable into a second one using strftime to format and print the date to a cell in Excel. Looking back, this set of scripts I have is quite complex for what it is doing. Glad I was able to get it to work. My date now shows up in Excel correct as i.e. Friday Jan 27, 2016.

I found that there are a lot of different variables to strptime using Time::Piece as well as strftime. Just had to figure out how to pass the output of it to where I wanted it.