I can support winds recommendations.

For working with Excel, I am using Win32::OLE a lot -and I am happy with it.

• However it works only if you are in a windows-environment ... and have Excel installed
• While even executing macros embedded in my documents works, I try to keep things as easy as possible:
  • I try to avoid formatting cells
  • I try to avoid creating charts etc. dynamically
  Even if both are possible (and sometimes needed), I think it makes my code "nasty"(*) and hard to mantain. Instead I create pre-formatted Excel-templates manually, which then I fill from Perl. Works fine :-)

wind also proposes Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. While I have never used them, they get recommended very often here ... so they are probably an excellent choice too.

Have fun! Rata

update: explanation of "nasty": (thanks for the feedback, davies)

I typically get a lot of data from our databases and create some grouping and statistics. The result should be reported in Excel. Of course the readers want the resulting Excel-sheets to look nice - some text should be bold, some normal, some cells need borders, different column widths, different background-colors ...

Of course it can be done with Win32::OLE. This link shows how. But soon I had hundreds of lines of pure Excel-formatting - many more than needed for retrieving, processing and writing the data. And I didn't like that. Especially after receiving requests to change column-orders and style-changes. That's why I consider it being "nasty" - and went to the manually-formatted template-solution.

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