I am trying what you suggested (and thank you!) but its not working.

Huh? I didn't suggest that - I wrote about an editor (vi) command. But since you are bringing that up - re-read perlform, the chapter "Accessing Formatting Internals".

If you construct your format into a string, you have to either eval it -

my $format = '| @' . '>' x 10 . ' | ' . '@' . '<' x 10 . " |\n"
           . '$given, $surname' ."\n"
           . '.';

eval "format STDOUT = \n$format";

for ([qw(Bill Bruford)],[qw(Ginger Baker)]) {
    ($given, $surname) = @$_;
    write;
}
__END__
|        Bill | Bruford     |
|      Ginger | Baker       |
[download]

or use formline and the accumulator $^A :

my $format = '| @' . '>' x 10 . ' | ' . '@' . '<' x 10 . " |\n";

for ([qw(Bill Bruford)],[qw(Ginger Baker)]) {
    formline( $format,@$_);
    print $^A;
    $^A = '';
}
__END__
|        Bill | Bruford     |
|      Ginger | Baker       |
[download]

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}