~× wrote...
...
There are three areas I need help on:
1) Do I have an alternative to SendKeys?

Yes, but you'll need to determine the pathname for the perl executable
You're almost certainly taking advantage of the PATHEXT environmen
variable and file associations.

From a console prompt (aka DOS prompt) issue the commands

assoc .pl

which should return something like

.pl=Perl

then

ftype Perl

(replacing 'Perl' with whatever is on the right hand side of the '=' i
the assoc comand's result). ftype's result should show the command lin
you'd need to use in Excel/VBA.

Then search for the function ShellAndWait in this newsgroup in Googl
Groups Advanced Search.

2) Could I have considered reading the binary file in Excel? If so
any hints or tips to get me started looking in the right direction
would be terrific.
...

Not reliably. It'd be a better idea to scrap Excel entirely and creat
the reports in Perl (after all, the 'r' in Perl stands for 'Reporting
when it doesn't stand for 'Rubbish')

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