I have been looking at this problem for sometime now. I want to be able to go through bunch of documents and extract some info from MS Word table and output to an HTML file.

Right now, I don't care about the actual extracted cell being outputted to HTML, rather I just want to print to cmd prompt. The problem is it hangs my cmd prompt window when I run it (used to be worse - it kept beeping until I had to take the laptop battery out) and does not output what I want. How do I read the cell and output to cmd correctly? 

use warnings;
use strict;
# we are going be working with MS Word Objects
use Win32::OLE qw(in with);

# some sites advise me to use these but I am not sure
# why we need them and can't really understand 
# win32::OLE. If there is a way to decipher them I am happy
# to know
# use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Word';
# use Win32::OLE::Enum;

use CGI; # we'll be having some HTML writing

my $text = "";
my $directory = "../sample_folder";
opendir (DH, $directory) || die "can't opendir $directory: $!";
# test whether the item returned by grep is a file and its name does n
+ot start with "_"
# because there is one redirect input which start with "_"
my @dir_list = grep { (/^EN-US_.+/) && -d "$directory/$_" } readdir(DH
+); 

# we are working with Word application
my $Word = Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application', 'Quit');

my $root = "C:\\Documents and Settings\\parent_folder";
foreach (@dir_list){
    
    # extract the language abbreviation
    m/^EN-US_(.+)$/i;
    
    my $doc = "$root\\EN-US_$1\\sample_doc.doc";
    
    $Word->Documents->Open("$doc") || die("Unable to open $doc ", Win3
+2::OLE->LastError());
    $Word->{Visible}= 0; # we don't need to see Word in an active wind
+ow

    # get the first table
    my $table = $Word->ActiveDocument->Tables(1);
    
        # $table -> Select(); # do I need to select?
    $text = $table->Cell(1,1)->Range->{Text};
    print "*$text*";
    
    
    #my $language = lc($1);
    
    # Prepare OUT_FOOTER file
    #open(OUT_FOOTER, "> $directory/updates/footer_$language.html") ||
+ die("can't open $directory/updates/footer_$language.html for writing
+: $!");
    
    # close document and Word instance
    print "Closing document and Word\n";
    $Word->ActiveDocument->Close();
    
    close OUT_FOOTER;
}
$Word->Quit;
closedir DH;

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In reply to WIN32::OLE MS WORD TABLE CELL READING PERL by pooTan

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