If you haven't seen it yet, the node Index of Spreadsheet FAQs is a very good resource. There's also Using Win32::OLE and Excel - Tips and Tricks from the Tutorials section. The best general advice i can give is that if you can write it in vb (or have excel record a macro for you), you can probably directly port it to perl/Win32::OLE code. Beyond controlling excel itself, Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is very good for creating (but can't update) xls files as well (and doesn't require windows or excel).