Short answer: It depends on what you mean by "run".

Longer answer:
When you read data from an Excel spreadsheet via OLE, you first, via OLE, create instances of Excel components. These same components are used when you use the Excel GUI. No components, no access to Excel via OLE.

However, the format of an Excel spreadsheet has been reverse engineered. Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is a platform-independent way to create Excel spreadsheets. There may be platform-independent ways to read them (Spreadsheet::ParseExcel might be such a way -- I haven't looked at it.)

Try searching CPAN for "Excel".

This is a question that comes up from time to time in some of the Excel programming goups. The answer to date has always been no.

Apart from Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, suggested above, you can also read an Excel file using ADO or ODBC (through DBI). There are some other suggestions here.

--
John.

Your best bet would be to use the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module. It's fairly easy to use and there have been a few nodes written here about. Try Super Search.

use Win32::OLE;

my $excel = Win32::OLE->new(['172.16.12.100','Excel.Application']) 
    or die "Can't start excel: $!";

my $workbook = $excel->Workbooks->Open('c:\test.xls')
    or die "Can't open file: ",Win32::OLE->LastError();

my $sheet = $workbook->Worksheets(1)
    or die "Can't open sheet: ",Win32::OLE->LastError();

my $everything=$sheet->UsedRange()->{Value}
    or die "Can't get range: ",Win32::OLE->LastError();

for (@$everything) {
       for (@$_) {
        print defined($_) ? "$_|" : "<undef>|";
       }
       print "\n";
}
$excel->Quit;
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