I, too, have no experience of anything beyond Win32::OLE, but that's because I'm always on Windows and usually doing something that's pushing at or beyond the limits of WriteExcel. I have had no trouble at all with it, and have even found it to circumvent at least one VBA "issue" (see Re: Win32 Ole find 2nd to last column in Excel).

I very rarely work with charts, and never that I can remember in Perl, but I don't have your objection to formatting cells. I don't see what's "nasty" about Re: Formatting cells in Excel, except that I haven't put the format string in a constant. But I'm always keen to learn, so please tell me more!

Regards,

John Davies