I was reading about the Summary info only the other night in a Delphi COM Programming book. Something about Property Sheets. In a DocFile, there are streams directly off the root (where the stream name starts with, I think, 0x05). The stream you want is <0x05>SummaryInformation. If you've got Visual Studio, you can use the DocFile Viewer to look at these streams. You *should* be able to use OLE::Storage or OLE::Storage_Lite to get into these (but I've never tried it myself). I'm not sure if you are trying for a pure Perl i.e. platform-independent solution or a Windows-only one (in which case you could write a helper DLL). The underlying API calls you need are StgOpenStorage and then using the returned IStorage interface, OpenStream (dunno if you could use Win32::API with these calls?).