Hi
ark989!
Please do not start to convert your data back and forth!
Excel read and even writing is an easy task with Perl!
I'm used to do all sort of things with Excel.
To start up try to play with Win32::OLE for example. (http://search.cpan.org/~jdb/libwin32-0.27/OLE/lib/Win32/OLE.pm)
Best regards,
Davide