You would earn the gratitude of thousands of Perlers if you would take that solution and wrap it in a CPAN distribution. Maybe take a look at Alien to guarantee the OpenOffice installation. It sounds dumb to release a CPAN distribution for just a few lines of a system call, but it's a really big deal to be able to interface with this process using a Perl module. And, if you built it generically enough, then you could very easily extend this to wrap all the format manipulations that OO provides. THAT would be awesome!