Although you are looking for a Perl solution (as a non-Perl programmer?) I will mention two alternative solutions.

1. Depending on the version of Excel that you are using you can also directly import XML into Excel. The web is full of examples.

2. You can solve it using a more XML-ish way. In general, whenever you have to transform XML into something think XSLT. The simplest way of producing something that can be imported in Excel is to produce CSV. See for example Using XML::XSLT to convert XML to CSV for some ideas.

Cheers

Harry