I'm missing something here. You have a working system using Perl on a Win32 machine. You don't mention it, but I guess it's too slow or too awkward or for some other reason, you want to do it on a Linux box, is that right?

Well, noone has mentioned the fun and excitement you could possibly enjoy by emitting XML or HTML tables and having Excel import them...Only works on 97 or later, but it's another way to do it. Googling or CPAN should help.