OK, I do have mod_perl installed. I have now installed libapreq and the demo works. Thanks. I had to change the makefile and hard code the paths to the includes and libs MyConfig wasn't picking them up!!.
So now I can generate Excel files on the fly from a handler, but I don't want to write a new handler for every file. How do I pass values onto the handler so that it can acces the correct database and dataset? I've never played with handlers before so this is completely new territory for me.