If you would like to manipulate an Excel file directly, you should use the module Win32::OLE. This will actually launch Excel in the background (you can verify this by looking for instances of EXCEL.EXE in the Task Manager) and do whatever changes you want to make. Some example code might be (for your question 2 (untested since I'm on Linux atm)):

my $excel = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application');
my $workbook = $excel->Open("filenamehere.xls");
$workbook->Sheets[0]->{Name} = "New Sheet Name";
$workbook->Save();
$excel->Quit();
[download]

The full documentation for this is found on MSDN online and available for a free download. Look for "Microsoft Excel Visual Basic Reference." You will obviously need to translate the examples from VB into Perl, and the documentation for Win32::OLE explains more clearly how to do that. Particularly look at the section on Office. As for caveats, note that this will only work on Windows and only on a machine that has Excel installed.

For your question 1, I think you just want to copy a file under another name. This isn't really specific to Excel, so you should use the module File::Copy, which should be available on PPM if you don't have it already.

Using Win32::OLE module is one of the better ways of doing excel automation on windows machine. But if the requirement is that you have to have more than one instance running and creating excel files , using SpreadSheet module available on CPAN the best bet.

Yes, this is true, but the OP is specifically concerned with modifying attributes of an existing Excel file, which Spreadsheet::WriteExcel can't do. You can, of course, combine Spreadsheet::ParseExcel with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, but this a) is difficult and b) won't work if your original Excel file contains contains elements Spreadsheet::WriteExcel doesn't support.

This link might be helpful for you.

http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=153486