Question

What’s the simplest way to parse an Excel file in Perl? Converting it to a text file would also work.

Answer 1

The best way is to use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.

Here is an example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w  use strict; use warnings;  use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;  my $parser   = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new(); my $workbook = $parser->parse('Book1.xls');  for my $worksheet ( $workbook->worksheets() ) {      my ( $row_min, $row_max ) = $worksheet->row_range();     my ( $col_min, $col_max ) = $worksheet->col_range();      for my $row ( $row_min .. $row_max ) {         for my $col ( $col_min .. $col_max ) {              my $cell = $worksheet->get_cell( $row, $col );             next unless $cell;              print 'Row, Col    = ($row, $col)\n';             print 'Value       = ', $cell->value(),       '\n';             print 'Unformatted = ', $cell->unformatted(), '\n';             print '\n';         }     } } 

To convert an Excel file to text with Perl I’d recommend excel2txt which uses Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.