Thanks, JohnGG. Your suggestions made a huge improvement to the script. Moreover, you showed me several better techniques I can utilize. When I first started writing it, I knew it could be way better; hence the posting. I think I am going to take a breather now and work on generating the file to excel. Since you skipped the set of rows, I can leave out $rcount. Below is how it looks now. Thanks, Dave

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::OLE;

my $ex = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application') or die "oops\n";
my $book = $ex->Workbooks->Add;
my $sheet = $book->Worksheets(1);

my $inputFile = q{c:/INPUT.TXT};
open my $inputFH, q{<}, $inputFile or die qq{open: < $inputFile: $!\n}
+;

my $outputFile = q{C:/OUTPUT.TXT};
open my $outputFH, q{>}, $outputFile or die qq{open: > $outputFile: $!
+\n};


{
    local $/ = \1173;
    my $discard = <$inputFH> for 1 .. 7;    

    while (<$inputFH>) {
        $rcount ++;
        $sheet->Range("A1:CD100")->{value} =  unpack("A34 A30 A40 A40 
+A40 A40 A40 A2 A9 A9 A6 A40 A34 A3 A8 A1
                    A1 A10 A20 A10 A34 A15 A15 A15 A8 A8 A8 A8 A3 A3 A
+40 A10 A7
                    A20 A7 A15 A5 A8 A20 A15 A15 A15 A15 A15 A15 A1 A4
+0
                    A5 A8 A1 A3 A3 A3 A20 A10 A1 A15 A15 AA50 A1 A8 A1
+0
                    A1 A7 A3 A7 A1 A1 A15 A8 A15 A3 A15 A8 A20 A6 A6 A
+20 A15
                    A15 A15 A40 A15", $_);
    }
}

close $inputFH;
close $outputFH;

$book->SaveAs('C:\test.xls');
undef $book;
undef $ex;
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