Context, young one! Context!

Internally, on Win32 (<==a context), Perl sees './test.xls', "./test.xls", '.\test.xls', and ".\\test.xls" as the same thing. But if you pass a pathname to something else (oh, say, part of the Windows API known as OLE, another context...), you need to make sure that thing will understand what you mean.

To the Windows API, OLE, MS-Office, etc and so forth, "./test.xls" has no meaning.

Capiche?