I'd like a little clarification here. I assume, given that you want this activiated by a link in a browser, that we have a client/server situation here. Do you want the word document to open on the client computer, or do you want to open and read a word document with your perl code? Is the word document on the client computer, or on the server?

If you want a word document which resides on the server to be opened on the client machine, as simple link with a http url path to the document will work. If the word document is on the clients machine, you can use a link with a file:// and a path to the document.

<a href="http://your.server/path/to/word.doc">click here</a>
<a href="file://C:/path/to/word.doc">click here</a>
[download]

If you were running your perl code on the client side, via a gui or perl script embedded in html, I suppose you could use Win32::OLE to start word, and make it open a document, but I would think it would be easier to use simple links in a browser.

I hope this is helpfull, let me know if there is anything which remain unclear.