Last week I asked about reading a web page and working on it. Kindly Monks suggested I used either WWW::Mechanize and/or Web::Scraper.
I could not easily try either of these since my Perl distribution did not include them. However, LWP::Simple was available and I tried this. This let me do what I want of:
1. Reading a web page
2. Storing it as an html file
3. Opening the html file in Excel
4. Using Perl Excel to read and store the figures from the web page that I needed.

It would have been useful to store the spreadsheet as a spreadsheet so I used the line (see trial code below) $workbook -> SaveAs ($spsh_file);. The file name did include .xlsx as the extension.
This did store the spreadsheet. However, when I tried to open it within Excel I was told that the file extension or format was not valid.
If I do not have a file extension, it is stored as with .htm as the extension.

Is there a way that you can choose what format will be used when storing an open Excel file?
For example, in some circumstances it would be good to store the spreadsheet as a comma delimited file.
In yet other circumstances a pdf file would be good. 
use strict;
use OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const "Microsoft Excel";
use LWP::Simple;
my ($catalog, $url, $url_file, $spsh_file);
my ($excel, $workbook, $sheet);
$url = "http://www.oreilly.com/catalog";
$url_file = "C:\\oreilly_file.html";
$spsh_file = "C:\\oreilly_spreadsheet.xlsx";

getstore($url, $url_file);
$excel = CreateObject OLE "Excel.Application";
$excel -> {Visible} = 1;
#___ OPEN EXISTING WORKBOOK
$excel->{DisplayAlerts}=0;   
$workbook = $excel    -> Workbooks -> Open("$url_file");
$sheet    = $workbook -> Worksheets(1) -> {Name};
$sheet    = $workbook -> Worksheets($sheet);
$sheet               -> Activate;
$workbook -> SaveAs ($spsh_file);
$excel -> Quit;

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In reply to Reading and storing a web page as a spreadsheet query by merrymonk

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