Its true. Only perl can save you.

But if you are just getting started with the language, you'll want to look at: the tutorials hosted at this site, and learn how to use perldoc. Good advice above, regarding starting with WWW::Mechanize to crawl your existing data. If you ultimately need vcards, don't waste your energy on MS OLE, if there are other paths to nirvana, and apparently there are.

Start your scripts with:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict; 
use warnings; 
use diagnostics; # comment out for production
[download]

read up about Taint. And keep bringing your questions back here. You might even consider joining, getting your own login, etc. It will make it easier to track responses to your questions. A lot of anonymous monks around here post a lot of questions to sift through.

-- Hugh