You'll get a little extra benefit if you avoid entering a BLOCK, so:

  for my $i (1 .. $LastRow) {
    next if ($Sheet->Range("E$i")->{Value} =~ /MSD/) ;
    $CB_COUNT++;

    next if ($Sheet->Range("J$i")->{Value} =~ /No_/i) ;
    $NM_COUNT++;
  }
[download]

but as noted elsewhere, the major time cost is probably in the OLE calls.

Is it possible to pull a range into an array ? I'm thinking: @stuff = $Sheet->Range("J1:J$lastrow") ?