Yes, everyone here loves Perl, including me, but I'm not convinced it is the right tool for this. Given that you are working with two members of the MessWare Orifice Microsoft Office family, I would expect VBA to be a more efficient tool. I haven't automated Word much, but it is possible to open an instance of Word or Excel from the other. This would be a more portable solution, as it wouldn't rely on a computer having Perl with all the right modules installed. Even if you do need Perl for whatever reason, I usually find the easiest way is to write whatever VBA is needed directly, and convert it to Perl only when it's working.

Regards,

John Davies