anjamesc has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have an excel file which needs to be converted a pipe delimited file. I am not too sure where to start. If i were to read a delimited file I know this file can be read as its a text file. But when we have a excel file, how can i read its contents ??
  • Comment on Converting Excel File(XLS) to convert into a pipe delimited file

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Re: Converting Excel File(XLS) to convert into a pipe delimited file
by Tux (Canon) on Mar 12, 2013 at 10:33 UTC
Re: Converting Excel File(XLS) to convert into a pipe delimited file
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 12, 2013 at 07:49 UTC
Re: Converting Excel File(XLS) to convert into a pipe delimited file
by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Mar 12, 2013 at 14:27 UTC

    Be that as it may, I usually use OLE to do this sort of thing, and I often wind up doing it in Excel.   In other words, and if the spreadsheet is important and fixed, instead of writing an external script to read the Excel data, I write a VB script within Excel to push the data out.   I write the script to use named cell ranges, rather than coordinates.

    Now, the “export such-and-such range of data” capabilities within Excel are already very powerful, and this is a very common task.   Explore all of your alternatives carefully.