in reply to Asssigning widget identifier

All that message says is that $f22 = undef. Sometimes subs return undef in the case of errors. Because I can not see $f22 anywhere in the code you provided and my knowlegde of Tk is minimal I will stop my answer here. Hopefully it will get you a bit further until others appear.

Update: sorry I spotted my $id = "\$f" . $j . $c; # Create identifier

But you are overriding your identifier in the next line by $id = $frame->Text

Should you perhaps declare a hash before the loops and then save each return of $frame->Text() to that keyed on (ad-hoc) id names? For example:

my %widgets = (); ... # your loops my $id = "f" . $j . $c; # Create identifier my $awidget = $frame->Text(-height => 6, -background => 'white', -width => 10) ->pack(-side => 'left'); die "widget failed $id" if ! defined($awidget); $widgets{$id} = $awidget; ... # closing the loops

Then you can access f22 like $widgets->{'f22'}->insert()...

Update #2: $widgets{'f22'}->insert()... is the correct way to access 'f22' widget