Great to hear back that you have a solution to your problem! I suspected that the odds were good given the ease at which I was able to run your code on my Active State machine. I've found the AS ppm (Perl Package Manager) to be quite good.

Yes, DataFromExcel is a "one trick pony". It only has one trick (convert worksheet to Array of Array), but it does that one trick well. It doesn't have convenience functions like accessing a cell like "D4", you have to go to $data->[3,3]. I just needed 2 columns from one sheet of a 5 sheet Workbook and that was enough for me. Mileage varies. The trade-off between complexity and features happens all the time.

Thanks++ for reporting that installing Spreadsheet::ParseExcel did what you needed. That feedback may help somebody else further down the road.