What is the best module for parsing Excel documents

[lupey]

Hello monks,

I'm about to start a small consulting job with a company that needs ~400 excel documents parsed. Rather than spend my time opening each document and manually saving it as "text", I've heard of Excel modules such as Spreadsheet-ParseExcel but I know little about how well they work. I'd like a module that is popular with the Perl community and one that is actively being maintained. If it makes a difference, I do most of my Perl scripting on Cygwin. Any suggestions?

Thank you

[erroneousBollock]

Spreadsheet::ParseExcel does what you want, but if you simply want to avoid manually opening excel to do the CSV exports, use Win32::OLE to automate the process.

-David

[Gangabass]

Also look at File::Extract (File::Extract::Excel).

[roboticus]

I've used Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, and really like it. However, I tend to stick to the plain vanilla features, so I don't know if it's suitable for what you want. If you're just wanting to read a bunch of data out of spreadsheets, it's probably the right choice.

...roboticus

[strat]

If you have Win32::OLE installed (I don't know if this is possible under Cygwin), you could have a look at ExcelPerl, e.g. convert the file to csv with something like:

perl excelPerl.pl -begin "use Text::CSV_XS; $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new( 
+{ binary => 1 } )" -ane "$csv->combine(@F); print $csv->string, $/" -
+f test.xls > outfile.csv

Or if you want to keep the formulas:

perl excelPerl.pl -begin "use Text::CSV_XS; $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new( 
+{ binary => 1 } )" -ane "$csv->combine( map { $_->{FormulaLocal} } @C
+); print $csv->string, $/" -f test.xls > outfile.csv