Hi Monks, I am using Excel via Win32::OLE and getting complaints when Excel is not already running. My code (with compliments and thanks to previous posts here at PerlMonks) includes:

# check if Excel exists
my $x = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Excel.Application');
if ($@) {
    warn "Excel not Installed.\n";
    die "Excel not Installed.\n";
}

# start Excel program, die if unable to
unless (defined $x) {
    $x = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application', sub { $_[0]->Quit; } ) 
    # and
    # sleep 1

    or
        warn "Cannot start Excel.\n"
        and
        die "Cannot start Excel.\n";
}

$x->{DisplayAlerts}=0;   # no messages from Excel
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When Excel had NOT been running for some time, the above produced an error message of:

Win32::OLE(0.1502) error 0x80010105: "The server threw an exception"
in PROPERTYPUT "DisplayAlerts" at /PerlApp/xls_subs.pl line 110
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which corresponds to the "$x->{DisplayAlerts}" line above. However, running the same chunk of code again, changing nothing, raised no exceptions. And so it seems that I'm getting hung up by an initialization process for Excel, that, once loaded in RAM, doesn't affect me again. Is uncommenting these lines

    # and
    # sleep 1
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the right approach or is there a way to wait until Excel is good and ready before proceding? Thanks.