Hello Monks, this is my first time posting, and I've tried to format this post as well as I could. Briefly, I'm a beginner programmer, have experience with Scheme and a little Python. I just started learning Perl last week, and so far I've read a fair amount of Perldoc and went through a presentation from an MIT course. I have a directory full of PDFs. I want to open each one, select all, copy, create a new .txt with the same name (preferably in a folder within this directory), and paste the copied PDF into each .txt. Then I want to go through every .txt and extract 4 important pieces of information and paste them into an Excel table. First question: is Perl the best language to do this in? If not, what should I be using? I have looked into AutoIt, but I also don't have admin access to this computer, which is a problem. If this is possible, here is what I have written so far, in an attempt to stitch together what I've learned in the last two days from reading perldoc and what I've found from my extensive google searching.

#!c:/perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE;
use File::Find;

# Start Excel and make it visible
my $xlApp = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application');
$xlApp->{Visible} = 1;

# Create a new workbook
my $xlBook = $xlApp->Workbooks->Add;

open FILE, "<Sodeco.txt";
my @report = <FILE>;
#print "@report\n";

#print "$report[2]\n";
my $counter = 0;
my $column = "A";
my $row = 1;

my $dir = "D:/Documents and Settings/m0F61468/Desktop/New Folder";
find(\&textify, $dir);
sub textify() {
    
        my $file = $_;
        
print "File name is $_\n\t\tFull path is $File::Find::name\n";
}

my @fourthings = ();
foreach (@report) {
    if (/^Spare part/) {
        $fourthings[2] = substr("$report[$counter]",12,-1);
        } elsif (/^Value of this amendment/) {
        $fourthings[3] = substr("$report[$counter]",25,-5);
        } elsif (/^Lurgi GmbH, Lurgiallee 5, D-60439 Frankfurt am Main
+/) {
        $fourthings[1] = substr("$report[$counter+2]",0,-1);
        } elsif (/^PO reference/) {
        $fourthings[0] = substr("$report[$counter+1]",0,10);
        }
    $counter += 1;
    }
    
#print "@fourthings\n";
#print "$fourthings[0]\n";
#print "$fourthings[1]\n";
#print "$fourthings[2]\n";
#print "$fourthings[3]\n";
my $four = [$fourthings[0], $fourthings[1], $fourthings[2], $fourthing
+s[3]];
print "$four\n";
# Write all the data at once...
my $rng = $xlBook->ActiveSheet->Range("A1:D1");
$rng->{Value} = $four;
[download]

The things that work in this code: given that I have already accomplished the task of converting all the PDFs to .txts using this imaginary subroutine "txtify", the search loop works very well. I really like the regular expressions in Perl. I know that if I could just figure out how to accomplish the PDF to text conversion, the second part (extracting the info and pasting to Excel) would be cake. I get the feeling that I just don't know nearly enough to do this, though. If the answer to this question is "learn more Perl," my reply is: what exactly should I read more about, and where can I find it? I am not here to have y'all write my program for me. I really just want to know what module I need to learn, or what things I should learn about Perl to accomplish this, and if it is possible. I do want to learn more Perl in the near future, but right now this in particular is frustrating me. Thank you. One more thing I noticed: in order to get the paste into excel to work, I had to use this double bracketed notation and a scalar variable. See: my $four = 4 scalars. For some reason it won't take the array @fourthings and paste it into Excel. Probably because it's an array. That I can work around though, that is a secondary question and only out of curiosity. -Nils