I think your suggestion to check the value of $Excel is a good one. However, the reference to perlop doesn't seem relevant here.

I'm guessing you're talking about this bit:

my $Excel = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Excel.Application')
    or Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application', 'Quit')
    or die "Could not start excel";
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This doesn't look like a $x = $y || $z assignment to me. It looks as if it's trying to GetActiveObject(), and if that fails, try to quit Excel. If that fails, just die.

Now that I look at it, the problem may be that GetActiveObject() fails, quitting Excel succeeds, and the script then doesn't die. It goes on to try to use (the bogus) $Excel anyway. So I'd try this:

my $Excel = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Excel.Application');
if ( ! $Excel ) {
    Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application', 'Quit');
    die 'Could not start Excel';
}
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