By the way: if you want to use an excel workbook in the way of a database, you could access Excel via Win32::ODBC or DBI and DBD::ODBC. An excelsheet is a table, and the name of this sheet plus a $ at the end is the name of the table, e.g. SELECT * FROM Sheet1$

Best regards,
perl -e "print a|r,p|d=>b|p=>chr 3**2 .7=>t and t"