thanks "anonymous Monk" for the response

anyways.. I found the problem.

I did a 'whereis make' .. and realized that there is no make in /usr/bin

Then, out of curiosity, I did a 'whereis gcc' .. and realized no gcc either in /usr/bin

Oddly, I have Xcode installed and these (gcc and make) exist in /Developer/usr/bin

Then I tried to 'look Spreadsheet::WriteExcel' (in CPAN shell) and tried to do the manual install steps of

perl Makefile.PL
/Developer/usr/bin/make install
no dice still. It told me that
make: *** No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h', needed by `Makefile'. Stop.
Finally I think my perl installation is pretty much fried. Will reinstall from my OSX DVD.