Reading excel file using PERL

[Anonymous Monk]

I'm using Perl to parse through an Excel file and I'm having trouble with a date field. The date displays as 8/14/2009 (mm/dd/yyyy)but when the script runs it is printing as "Win32::OLE::Variant=SCALAR(0x2626704)" for value and 36756 for formula. Is there any way to read the date field and print it as date format (dd/mm/yyyy)?

[n3toy]

Excel stores the date as a serial date, which is different from how it displays dates.

DateTime::Format::Excel may be of help to you.

[graff]

Are you using Spreadsheet::ParseExcel? If so, how are you using it? (In other words: show us some relevant perl code.) If you're not using that, what are you using? (That is, show us some code.)

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi,

I am using Win32::OLE to read from the excel file.

printf "At ($row, $col) the value is %s\n",
$Sheet->Cells($row,$col)->{'Value'};

[graff]

I don't know about Win32::OLE, but with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, you have your choice of getting the (unformatted) "Val" or the (formatted) Value for each cell (and you'll want to choose the latter, though the date format you get will depend on how the spreadsheet was set up). Using the module's OO-style interface, it's a difference between a hash value and a method call:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

my $Usage = "Usage: $0  filename.xls\n";
die $Usage unless ( @ARGV == 1 and -f $ARGV[0] );

my $xcl = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook->Parse( $ARGV[0] );

for my $sheet ( @{$xcl->{Worksheet}} ) {
    printf( "Sheet: %s\n", $sheet->{Name} );
    for my $row ( $sheet->{MinRow} .. $sheet->{MaxRow} ) {
        for my $col ( $sheet->{MinCol} .. $sheet->{MaxCol} ) {
            my $cell = $sheet->{Cells}[$row][$col];
            printf( " row %s, col %s: unformatted= %s, formatted= %s\n
+",
                    $row, $col, $cell->{Val}, $cell->Value );
        }
    }
}