in reply to need program to hang out awhile?

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a simple -print command line option for Excel. Somehow you need to control Excel and tell it to print (there will be "print areas" and such to be dealt with which I don't think a simple thing looking at a .XLS file will be able to do).

I found this .vbs script that can be used like: wscript "C:\Data\My Scripts\printXLS.vbs" "C:\Data\My Reports\Daily Analyser Excursion Report.xls". There are Perl modules that can control Excel and Word via OLE environment, but I don't know how to use them. Anyway check this out for at least one idea of how to proceed...If all else fails, you could call this thing from Perl. I haven't run this code myself but Poster claims that it works and it does seem applicable to what you want to do. Good Luck!

http://blog.idxonline.com/2009/08/scheduling-printing-of-excel-file-which.html