Note, I still consider myself a student programmer so I'm not experienced as I'd like to be yet, but hopefully a few of you can lend me a bit of your expertise, which I would greatly appreciate :) My background with Perl: I have some experience programming in Perl before but confined within a Linux environment.

My current project is to build an application for Windows,of which I have zero experience developing for, to be used by mostly non-technical colleagues. The objective is to create an application that can open and parse, filter , and modify (inserts/deletes/update) data across a bunch of linked excel spreadsheets. I should note that this "project" of mine is just a "side goal" for me. After observing how some of my non-technical colleagues manually parse through spreadsheets after spreadsheets, I'd like to alleviate them of such a tedious task by helping automate this part of their work and hopefully save them some time and effort in the future.

I've done a bit of research on methods people have used for similar projects and I found CSPAN's Spreadsheet::ParseExcel a seemingly good fit for my project needs. My problem is I'm currently trying to built this app in a restricted windows environment (by restricted, I mean I'm limited to just ActiveState Komodo IDE and Notepad++, unless I request special access for other kinds of software/applications) Currently, I'm just using Notepad++ to code as I'm still familiarizing myself with Komodo.

My questions at this stage are:

1. Is Komodo really a good IDE for developing Perl apps? (I've heard very little of it) Or would Strawberry Perl be a more fitting development tool? (Strawberry is not accessible to me at the moment, but I can try to request access if appears to be the better environment)

2. How exactly do I install CSPAN modules via windows (I'm assuming its not as simple as a "sudo apt-get install" like in Linux)?

3. Aside from CSPAN's Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module, are there any other (possibly "better", although arguable) modules/libraries you would recommend for working with Excel?

4. Any and all advice on how I to approach this project would be fantastic and I would greatly appreciate any tips and guidance I can get.

Thank you, all.

In reply to Advice on building a Perl App for Windows by Anonymous Monk

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