I haven't tried exactly this before... yet I did write my own excel/perl import/export function.

What I learned is the following: The API is the same. Meaning: You can use the same commands and parameters. What this means for you is the following:

Xls = Workbooks.Open ( $filename, undef, undef, undef, $password);
[download]

Give this a spin, and if you have still problems, replace the undef's with emtpy strings.

/oliver/