Im getting "Checking the com ports" in one cell and "testing is done" in the next cell whereas I want the whole point to come in the same cell.

They are on two different lines in the word-file, so you get two different entries.

BUT: your "snippet" cannot work. Your test if($line =~ m/starts here$/) will be true on the line that ends with starts here and false everywhere else, so you actually never reach the line that puts "Checking the com ports" into the spreadsheet!

Anyhow, if you want to put more than one line in the same record, you will have to accumulate the data into a variable. That means you must know when to start and when to stop accumulating the data. From the limited extract of data you show, it is difficult to see how the word-file is made up. If you show us some more data, please put this data inside <code> ... </code> tags, so we can clearly see how it is formatted.