You can be assured that Perl is sane in that respect. String-eval should be avoided in most cases, and in your case especially, as Perl works exactly how one would imagine, evaluating the expressions one after another. If you really are paranoid about the order Perl does things in, it helps to split up such long method chains into separate statements:

# $rowval    = eval "\$ex->Workbooks(1)->Worksheets(\'Versions\')->Cel
+ls($rowcounter,1)->{Value}" ;

my $wb = $ex->Workbooks(1);
my $ws = $wb->Worksheets('Versions');
my $c  = $ws->Cells($rowcounter,1);
my $rowval = $c->{Value};
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