http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=464273


in reply to Extracting the value of an Excel Cell using Win32::OLE

And it won't be too long before extracting data from Microsoft Office files will be made a whole lot easier. Their next version (Office 12) will save Word, Excel and Powerpoint files in XML format. More info. Perl is an adept language for extracting information from XML files (among many others).
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Code is untested unless explicitly stated
mlh2003