In reply to the above two... I had thought of using Win32::CtrlGUI but haven't done so before. (Not that that is any reason not to) I just thought that it was quite likely to get rather ugly. Thanks for your information, I also found the same / similar information last night and this is actually what led me to my conclusion. Bearing in mind that I am new to all this... Anyway I can change the format to standard csv and this works fine... just not ideal for what I wanted. I would be interested in any solutions where I can use my existing delimiters | and ~ .