First question: is Perl the best language to do this in?

Perl is good enough

If not, what should I be using?

VBScript, JScript, PowerShell ... but if you don't know either of those, perl will work

just figure out how to accomplish the PDF to text conversion

Why can't you do the same thing you're doing with Excel; use OLE on pdf reader, select all, copy, paste ?

The last time I did similar, I used CAM::PDFs getpdftext.pl with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel

For some reason it won't take the array @fourthings and paste it into Excel

Probably a syntax error on your part , as evidenced by your usage of array indices

my @fourthings = 1..4;
my $fourthings = \@fourthings;
my $stillFourthings = $fourthings;
my $newFourthings = [ @fourthings ];
[download]

See Tutorials: Data Type: Array, references quick reference, perlintro, http://learn.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/