Thanks, all, but I'm still having no luck: the default printer (powered up) just sits there staring back at me, though I don't receive any Perl errors any longer. Could it be that the printer isn't selected correctly?
I'm trying all sorts of variations of:
$printer = "c:\\Progra~1\\Micros~1\\Office\\Excel.exe \/p";
$file = "Book1.xls";
system ($printer $file) or die "cannot";
On a side issue, how do I get a d@%! newline into my posts here? Thanks again, cypress