I have been using perl along with OLE for quite some time now. And trust me, you are on the right track. The only trick in saving the time is getting the right object name/accessing its methods/properties etc. Though Microsoft does provide OLEviewer/registry. But I do not find it quite helpful. As you need to search and end up spending a lot of time. But I did find "winspy" and "windowse" quite useful for the said task. Not only excel, it works quite well in all the Office appls that include word/PPT/MSOutlook etc. Not only MS, I have used it in automating other tasks as well(like buiding and testing installers)etc.