I agree with some of the other posters. In many situations there is no "correct" solution. Just several good ones. The final decision rests on what is convenient, how much time you might have to learn new tricks, etc. Since this is at work, financial constraints probably apply. If you do not know Perl and working on a windows system, I think VBA might be your best bet, but I would advise against Access. SQL server would be a much better idea (What about Oracle? Last I heard they were offering a free DB without source code). My personal opinion is that using compiled Perl defeats the purpose of using Perl.

Cheers

mndoci

"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?"-Sherlock Holmes in 'A study in scarlet'