Working with Perl and Excel 2007 spreadsheets (on a windows XP Pc), I have used assignment statements such as 
$excel->{ActivePrinter} = "Auto HP Deskjet 6500 Series on HOMEDELLTOWE
+R on Ne02:";

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Frequently the problem has been to find out the ‘name’ of the variable to set – for example ActivePrinter.
Therefore I thought it would be useful if I could find out all the variables associated with $excel.
To this end I tried the following, hoping the $excel was a reference to a hash.
use strict ;
use OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const "Microsoft Excel";
my ($excel, $workbook, $sheet, $jex);
$excel = CreateObject OLE "Excel.Application";
$workbook = $excel    -> Workbooks -> Add;
print "before jex loop\n";
foreach $jex (sort {$a cmp $b} %$excel) {
    print "$jex <$excel->{$jex}\n";
}
print  "after jex loop\n";

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This failed and I got a ‘windows’ error message saying that “perl.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."
What is the correct way of finding out what is ‘in’ $excel?

In reply to Finding out Excel 'variables' by merrymonk

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