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".