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";
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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