It's been awhile since I went down this road but doesn't is still show up in the task bar? Sure it's more than one key stroke or if you are an 'alt-tab focus' person then that, but my recollection (and personal frustrating experience) is that the application is still running in a keystroke/mouse accessible way to the user. For any long running parsing your risk of clicking on Excel goes up especially if you use Excel for other purposes.

This wasn't really part of my initial answer but the other risk of using Win32::OLE is that you have available both read and write capabilities for the file. In general this won't be a problem but you risk the case where you overwrite data before you have read it.

In reply to Re^3: How to operate on multiple Excel worksheets with variable array by jandrew
in thread How to operate on multiple Excel worksheets with variable array by bill5262

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.