I agree with you. It's great to try your hand at things to find other ways of doing everyday tasks. Perl is perfect for this sort of thing

Have a look at this node for information on the OLE browser. I posted this question because I had a vague idea about what OLE did but didn't know how the browser could help me. In the end, I used I couldn't have written the above code without it. For some reason the OLE browser didn't work on my PC - it turns out that I needed to make a change to the registry. Thanks Zoogie!

My understanding(from my imagination) of OLE is that most (not all) Win32 apps provide sort of external hooks. You can create an OLE object (it becomes an application server) with one of those applications and access those hooks from your Perl script. So in theory you can do whatever the application itself does (assuming that the author provided all the hooks.)

I have since written a Win32 script that uses OLE to "access" an Access database and pull out records etc.

While it's all quite fun, it means that your code isn't very portable though - you can only run it on Win32 (and maybe soon Mac?). So if there is a module out there that does the job I would stick to that.

UPDATE: I think maybe I put too many '()' in this reply. Maybe it's unreadable. Sorry.