I used Spreaadsheet::Read (with Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX):

use Data::Dumper;
use Spreadsheet::Read;

my $book = ReadData ("foo.xlsx");
print Dumper [ Spreadsheet::Read::rows($book->[1]) ];
[download]

I used "Merge and Center" so that my 2 left most columns (cat and dog) each had 3 cells to the right and the output was:

$VAR1 = [
          [
            'cat',
            'foo'
          ],
          [
            '',
            'bar'
          ],
          [
            '',
            'baz'
          ],
          [
            'dog',
            'one'
          ],
          [
            '',
            'two'
          ],
          [
            '',
            'tree'
          ]
        ];
[download]

This seems more ideal, but you'll still need to determine where the cut off is. You might be a victim of "garbage in/garbage out" as well. :(