I have seen cases where an OLE get method requires a variant to be passed and it sets the value of the variant. Such details may be handled "magically" by VB and you may have to be explicit with perl. I have no idea about mathcad or what the underlying (i.e. beneath the hood of VB) interface looks like. Nor do I have mathcad to test with. You might try investigating with a com object explorer to see what you can find about the getValue method.