I am sorry for scaring you. I did not intend to. You have a reasonable question, asked in a good way. What bothered me was the quality of the responses that you got. I hold answerers to a higher standard than questioners. As for your more specific question, there are two possible answers.

One is to use the format_csv function that I gave you, and write a loop where you walk through your data, fetch it into Perl, and then write the file yourself. I would generally suggest doing that, my experience is that it is easier to pull data into Perl and manipulate it in Perl than it is to drive an external application.

The other is to get the Excel approach working. Not having it available at the moment, I cannot test it. But I can tell you that the error message will not generally be put into $!. Instead you will need to call Win32::OLE::LastError() to get the error message. No promises, but the odds are pretty good that if you check that you will get useful feedback.