Having tried that version of your script myself, the problem that shows up in the excel file appears to be the result of "double encoding" into utf8. In other words, data that is already utf8 encoded gets treated as if it were plain-old single-byte Latin1, and gets encoded into utf8 again.

There might be better ways to fix this besides the following, but the following will work (at least, it did for me):

use Encode;  # add this near the top, with the other "use" statements

...

# write to spreadsheet, close excel

$sheet -> write ( 0, 0, decode( 'utf8', $writestring )); # add the "de
+code()" call
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