I’ve installed a nice little Perl module called Spreadsheet::ParseExcel on iOcean. This module allows you to open an Excel file in Perl and extract values using row-column coordinates. The module can handle multiple workbooks, and it also provides some basic metadata on the Excel file, including file name, author, number of rows and columns, number of workbooks, and workbook names. All in all, I’ve found it much easier to work with than converting Excel files to comma- or tab-delimited text. For more detailed information, see the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel documentation. As a prerequisite for this module, I also installed OLE::Storage_Lite, a more generic module for reading Microsoft’s OLE format documents.