Bulletpoints in spreadsheet being converted to double quotes

[viffer]

G'day all. I've run out of fingers (and patience) using google..
you're my last hope.
Probably should have been my first.. I'm reading a spreadsheet that contains bullet points in the cell.
For some reason the bullet points are being converted to speech quotation marks. Is there any way I can maintain the integrity of the data so that when I print the cell contents the bullet points are still there?
I push the spreadsheet cells into an array @arr, but when I look at the contents of @arr the bullet points are now speech marks.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

    my $spreadsheet_csv;
    open ( $spreadsheet_csv, '<', $LOOKUP_FILE );
    
    my $fname = $LOOKUP_FILE;

    my $excel = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook->Parse($fname);
    my @arr = ();

    my $sheet = $excel->{Worksheet}[0];
    foreach my $row ($sheet->{MinRow} .. $sheet->{MaxRow}) {
        foreach my $col ($sheet->{MinCol} ..  $sheet->{MaxCol}) {
            my $cell = $sheet->{Cells}[$row][$col];

            if (exists $cell->{Val}) {
                push @arr,$cell->{Val};
            }
            else {
                $cell->{Val} = '';
                push @arr,$cell->{Val};
            }
        }
    }