Hi NewMonk2Perl, Welcome to the Monastery.

In the Perl community from time to time you'll hear/read "TMTOWTDI", meaning There's more than one way to do it. Have you seen the module Spreadsheet::WriteExcel? You can use it to create Excel documents on various platforms, you don't need excel installed. It has great documentation and Examples.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;

my @mydata = (
    ['Item', 'Category', 'Price'],
    ['Nails', 'Hardware', '5.25'],
    ['Shirt', 'Clothing', '23.00']
    );

my $workbook = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new('test.xls');
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet();
$worksheet->write_col('A1', \@mydata);
[download]

If you're new to Perl I'd suggest working through the following:

• http://learn.perl.org
• http://perldoc.perl.org
• The Tutorials section of this site.

Update: I'll leave the formatting of the cells as an exercise for you, it's covered in the Documentation and the examples.

Update 2:Thanks toolc s/next/need/

Thank you for all the help and links to help me learn Perl. This is awesome information. There is just so much info on the net, its hard to seperate the good information from not so good information. Thanks again, Paul

I am using Win32::OLE for automatization of my Excel-tasks, and it works fine for me :-) . The main drawback of the module is that it requires Windows (and in my case also Excel) to be installed - so your scripts are not very portable.

HTH, Rata

Is this module not as good as the other modules to use with Excel?

I have no idea how Win32::OLE compares to other CPAN offerings since I have never used it. For what it's worth, it has received positive reviews.

# Hey changed the code from
$rng->{Value} = @mydata;

# To 
$rng->{Value} = \@mydata;
[download]

I am not sure how to get it to use all the rows with just using "\@mydata". I modified the code to work, but it is very inefficient. Can anyone think of a more efficient way to resolve this issue without using a loop? The code is below:

# Our data that we will add to the workbook...
@mydata = ("Item",     "Category", "Price"); 
@mydata1 = ("Nails",    "Hardware",  "5.25");
@mydata2 = ("Shirt",    "Clothing", "23.00");
@mydata3 = ("Hammer",   "Hardware", "16.25");
@mydata4 = ("Sandwich", "Food",      "5.00");
@mydata5 = ("Pants",    "Clothing", "31.00");
@mydata6 = ("Drinks",   "Food",      "2.25");           
           

# Write all the data at once...
$rngt = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A1:C7");
$rng = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A1:C1");
$rng1 = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A2:C2");
$rng2 = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A3:C3");
$rng3 = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A4:C4");
$rng4 = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A5:C5");
$rng5 = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A6:C6");
$rng6 = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A7:C7");
$rng->{Value} = \@mydata;
$rng1->{Value} = \@mydata1;
$rng2->{Value} = \@mydata2;
$rng3->{Value} = \@mydata3;
$rng4->{Value} = \@mydata4;
$rng5->{Value} = \@mydata5;
$rng6->{Value} = \@mydata6;
[download]

Read the code I gave you here, copy it, populate @mydata with all the data you want, run the script.