Yes! That's definitely a Cool Use For Perl. The CGI/DBI stuff looks cool, and I think that the whole idea of using Perl embedded in a spreadsheet (e.g. possibly using Tk even) would really be the "best thing since sliced bread"!

In my work we use Excel a lot to munge .csv files of names and telephone numbers to prepare them for import into the Remedy workflow/call-logging ARS system.

<grudging>Microsoft Excel is actually quite a good spreadsheet</grudging>, but it actually sucks at this job: because of being too 'helpful' at converting your numbers (like phone numbers) into different notation. There's also no really easy way of transforming a whole column - e.g. adding the international dialling code to a column, trimming the name, correcting capitalisation etc.

(it also has various bugs like assuming that if your .csv file begins with the header 'ID' (as our Remedy imports do...) that it's a Symbolic Link!)

So for a lot of the tasks I'd like to do, Excel and VBA are, er... suboptimal, while Perl would be excellent.

Cheerio!
Osfameron