Following a slightly corrupted 70:20:10 split -

• 5% of Office users are scared that they will delete something and make a complete mess. They hate computers but have to use them.
• 70% of Office users will be quite happy creating letters and reports in Word, spreadsheets in Excel etc. These people are quite happy to just get on with their work and not worry about the technology. This type of user will print out hundreds of documents that need to be reordered by hand becasue they had no idea that there was an option to 'print in reverse order'.
• 20% of Office users will learn more advanced techniques such as mail-merging, importing data from other Office applications etc. These users a lot of their time in Word, Excel etc. and have learned these techniues because they were interested and because it was worth the effort.
• The remaining 5% are borderline technology people who start out by recording macros and then graduate to VBA programming. They have probably designed their own website etc.

Interestingly, I count myself as being part of the 70%. I spend very little time doing anything in Word, Excel etc. I do however know quite a lot about Windows and technology in general.

In answer to the original question - No, Perl is an amazing language which can be applied to a great many technology areas. Working with Office however, is not one of them. Somebody wanting to do more with Office and learn about programming whould really graduate into the last 5% in my list and learn the basics using VBA before moving on to something else.

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