A Jedi relies not only on his lightsaber, but can quickly adapt to strange and unusual fighting situations with weapons at hand that are more specialised for the task.

Normally it is recommended that young jedi accolytes meditate deeply on the concept of computing, clearing their mind of software that is of commercial nature. So, naturally you will find fewer solutions to problems that are entrenched deep in the dark side of the software world.

Your large spreadsheet may be easily solved via VB and OLE for now, but perhaps if you considered making nice ways to import new spreadsheets to the database, and write new spreadsheets from information in the database, then the next problem that you encounter manipulating this data will be more easily tackled.

On the other hand, sometimes it is a better idea to simply use these tools to achieve small tasks, and put them down though you know that they are not as flexible and maintainable as a fully Free Software engineered solution. If the company you are working for has a culture of passing such things around, then you might be better off making sure that you make as good relations with your collegues on an interpersonal level as you can, use Perl for the small places it fits in such an enterprise, then wait for the right time, and move on to a company that fits your clear love of Free Software more fully.

Fighting for Free Software is good, but the conditions and culture must be present for it to flourish. You have learned a valuable lesson, young jedi.

$h=$ENV{HOME};my@q=split/\n\n/,`cat $h/.quotes`;$s="$h/."
."signature";$t=`cat $s`;print$t,"\n",$q[rand($#q)],"\n";
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