Perhaps you might want to post the entirety of the code you are using. That way, it is much easier for Monks to review and suggest corrections/improvements. Of course, we have now disgressed so far from the original question in this thread that it might be in your best interests to post a new SoPW including your code.

I have automated Excel from VB(A)? rather extensively, but rarely from Perl (so far). Yes, Excel does need to be running in order to automate it; I've always used code that makes sure to start Excel if an instance is not already running. So you may wish to investigate how Win32::OLE could do that for you, or possibly look into using the Windows scheduling service.