Once I figured out what a macro was (did I say I was new to excel? :) I got the problem straihgtened out.. Thanks. Also, as I said in the chatterbox, the problem wasn't excel or perl or anything. IT WAS ME!

I had a test.xls in my cwd. Excel, as I have been told (and found out :( has its own cwd, which it created test.xls in. Unbenownst to me, I looked at the old test.xls (which was blank because I had been using writeExcel, and well, long story).