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/