, which gives some good reasons to not run Office programs behind the scenes on a non-interactive session, like a CGI script. It points you at the OWC (Office Web Componants) which can be used for similar effect. Also consider Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, which will let you produce Excel files without the bloat of Excel itself.
I do a lot of Excel automation in interactive mode, but doing so in a CGI is risky and not advisable.