Well - I have bunch (50+) of large XLS files (Excel 2003) that are used as data for our software project - and developers are allowed to maintain them by hand and insert commands.

I wrote some Perl tools to do various automated data verification and population. But for that I need to be able to preserve comments in data files

Since part of the team moved to OpenOffice (but using XLS format) ideally I am looking for solution that would not use OLE - just for simplicity. I know how to do it (read/write comments) in OLE - at least for Excel APIs.