After a little playing around with this code example, and Excel 2003, it appears that some of the methods seem to operate only on the active worksheet that was last used, or on-top (The view at 75%) is one of them. This leads me to believe that Excel needs a more in-depth pointer to the sheet you want to use the methods on. I am not overly familiar with how to manipulate these as you seem to need, but I did read that the structure available to access the sheets and their properties can be found in the Visual Basic Help.

I did however include the code that I found from CPAN. Definitely, read the Win32::OLE documentation and use the Excel package example as it handles the closing of files even on abortion of the perl script. Otherwise, the excel file gets locked for editing. Wish I could do more :-(

#!perl

use Excel;
my $file = "C:\\perl_proj\\book1.xls";
my $ex = Excel->new('Excel.Application', sub {$_[0]->Quit;}) or die "O
+ops, cannot start Excel";
my $Book = $ex->Workbooks->Open($file);
my $Sheet1 = $Book->Worksheets(1);
$Book->Windows(1)->{Zoom} = 75;
$Sheet1->Columns->Font->{Size} = 12;
my $Sheet2 = $Book->Worksheets(2);
$Sheet2->Columns->{NumberFormat} = "#,##0.00";
$Book = $ex->Workbooks->Close();
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The Excel Module from the CPAN page Win32::OLE

package Excel;
        use Win32::OLE;

        sub new {
            my $s = {};
            if ($s->{Ex} = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application')) {
                return bless $s, shift;
            }
            return undef;
        }

        sub DESTROY {
            my $s = shift;
            if (exists $s->{Ex}) {
                print "# closing connection\n";
                $s->{Ex}->Quit;
                return undef;
            }
        }

        sub AUTOLOAD {
            my $s = shift;
            $AUTOLOAD =~ s/^.*:://;
            $s->{Ex}->$AUTOLOAD(@_);
        }

        1;
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