Monks:

Unlike most(a lot?) of you, I am retired and I enjoy learning Perl and wxPerl. As such, my time is free, which gives me a great appreciation for the time contributed to the Monastery by those of you who do make your living by doing Perl.

A few days ago I got a 911 from my daughter who is writing her Doctoral Dissertation in Economics. She needed data on all the power plants in the US. The available data came from the EIA and EPA. As governments are famous for, the plant identifiers between the agencies are different. She ended up with a 10,000 row spreadsheet to normalize.

I remembered reading posts on working with Excel. A search of the Monastery turned up Excel To Tab Delimited using Spreadsheet::ParseExcel posted by upallnight.

Within an hour I had installed the module from CPAN and had the sample code running against her data. Several iterations later, I could extract selected columns into a hash to determine the unique plant names and generate a file of edits compatible with Matlab. I still have 700 rows to manually edit, but Perl has already saved us a lot of time.

Whether you post a complete solution or just a hint, you never know who might can benefit from your knowledge even years after your post.

Thanks for all of your contributions.

Update: Fixed typo in title.

James