You have not said what program/version generated the spreadsheet, he version of the module, or what your platform/os is. Perhaps there is a dependency there.

Another possibility is that the key "merged" may have a different name, in your module version. Check for keys of %$ss, to see if any of them sound like "merged".

Just trying to be helpful, but I'm out of suggestions at this point.

I am running my script on a RedHat 6.0 machine using version 5.10.1 for perl. Have tried using 5.14.2 as well. There are no keys that remotely sound like merged info. From the description given here, http://search.cpan.org/~hmbrand/Spreadsheet-Read/Read.pm I can see all entries except the merged key in my book. Other than that, each cell in the attr key has a "merged" info. But I am getting merged = 0 on merged cells as well. Thanks!

I see this code in the module source:

$sheet{merged} = [
        map  {  $_->[0] }
        sort {  $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
        map  {[ $_, pack "NNNN", @$_          ]}
        map  {[ map { $_ + 1 } @{$_}[1,0,3,2] ]}
        @{$oWkS->get_merged_areas || []}];
[download]

This seems to indicate that "merged" is a WORKSHEET attribute - would you care to investigate that ?

        ...it is unhealthy to remain near things that are in the process of blowing up.     man page for WARP, by Larry Wall