in reply to Writing to Spreadsheets in PERL...

Directly from Microsoft on Excel 2007:
Characters in a cell that can be displayed and printed: Increased to 32,000.

There is still a hard limit of 32,767 characters per cell of which you can see only 32,000 characters!

So even using the new file format will not help you.

And it does not improve in Excel 2010: The official blog of the Microsoft Excel product team: Some other numbers ....

Fortunately some other limits were increased: rejoice all because your Excel 2010 workbook can now contain 4.3 billion unique colors!

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James