Gdata package perl issue

Question

I am attempting to follow this easy 2-minute video tutorial on importing an Excel spreadsheet into R as a data frame: http://www.screenr.com/QiN8

I followed each step, i

Answer 1

Make sure your path variable is NOT named "perl". I renamed it to prl and success!

This did NOT work:

perl <- "C:/Strawberry/perl/bin/perl.exe"
excel_gdata <- read.xls(url_xls, perl)

Error in findPerl(verbose = verbose) : 
  perl executable not found. Use perl= argument to specify the correct path.
Error in file.exists(tfn) : invalid 'file' argument

This works!

prl <- "C:/Strawberry/perl/bin/perl.exe"
excel_gdata <- read.xls(url_xls, prl)