Not really. That's supposed to be what the "Performance" row describes. Although SSWE was much faster in my case, I don't think the slowness of the program with Win32::OLE can be blamed on the module. I'm certain the speed depended much more on Excel XP (that's what I tried to convey by saying "depends on the underlying COM code"). I'm also guessing it had more to do with how I wrote the program.

Ah. I generally don't mix performance and speed. A program can perform well (do a good job) while being slow.

As far as the slowness being blamed on the module, it would probably depend on how the program that you are calling was written. And we all know how poorly written all M$ software is. ;)