"It's been awhile since I went down this road but doesn't is still show up in the task bar?": not in any Excel / OS combination I've used. The only way to see it is in the task manager, and then I've always had to look in processes rather than applications.

"the other risk of using Win32::OLE is that you have available both read and write capabilities for the file": if you are creating a file that you want to be read only, you can set the OS option accordingly at creation time & Excel will respect it. That applies even if you create the file using Excel.

I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't advantages to doing it your way in some - perhaps many - situations. But when I hack Excel, I'm usually doing something fairly technical that the WriteExcel module & its cousins can't do. So I'm always using Win32::OLE anyway (unless I'm writing directly in VBA) & therefore I'm more familiar with avoiding its dangers than with using other modules.

Regards,

John Davies