Is there another module other than Writer::Excel that would help me to easily parse the contents of each column picking out the empty rows above and below each data set?

Off the top of my head, Spreadsheet::ParseExcel for older files, or Spreadsheet::XLSX for newer ones. I've never used them, though. CPAN's down at the moment, but have you checked meta::cpan?

That's assuming you want to read an existing Excel file, of course.