Your question is a little ambiguous, but if you are dealing with Excel there are several excellent modules that can help you. The only question that I have is if you actually need Perl for this task? Is this something you are automating or can you just save it in a CSV file?

Spreadsheet::ParseExcel is supposed to do a good job of reading in Excel documents. I hear it does a good job with things like newlines embedded in cells that are otherwise hard to code for.

I can personally vouch for Spreadsheet::WriteExcel as being a very reliable tool for creating Excel (and StarOffice) readable spreadsheets. My co-workers looked at me bug-eyed in awe when I showed them that Perl could output Excel. "Yeah, Perl can do that," is my motto these days. :)

Good luck,
{NULE}
--
http://www.nule.org

If this is a one-shot conversion, you can manually save each sheet as a CSV (comma-separated value) file, then process them either directly or via File::CSV.

If this is something you'll be doing frequently, consult OLE - Getting all rows from Excel for some example code that'll get you 95% of the way there.

I believe there are a few Excel:: modules that will allow you to read and write Excel data. You might be able to export this.

If you literally mean you have input data with the format you mention above (thus making it pipe-delimited ASCII data, not an "Excel database"), it should be just a matter of splitting on the |'s and re-writing with commas, yes? There's some escaping to do (which Text::CSV can probably help with), but it should be fairly straightforward.

I apologize if I misunderstood your question.

You can also create an html representations of an Excel document that excel can load. The advantage of this approach over the Text:CSV format is that you get more control over the appearance of the spreadsheet. Column width, Fonts are controlable. You can also do formulas. The reason for doing this is to create Excel output from another program that is not excel. Try this: 1. Create using Excel a simple version of the spreadsheet you want to produce. SaveAs 'html' if you open it with notepad you will see a text format that can be produced by a program. 2. Rename the file with an xls extention. When you open it Excel opens it just as if it were an excel file. 3. Create your file using the format you saw in step #1 substitute your own values. Problems: If you have data in more than one worksheet in your excel file the SaveAs 'html' produces a file, a folder with a bunch of other files. This makes things much more complicated. In my case I am trying to make email attachements the multi file version of this is not good. Conclusion: If you are creating something with just one worksheet or have a more robust way of distributing your result the html format works well.

• What Platform are you on?
• How many files are there?

Otherwise the two Spreadsheet:: modules listed above will help greatly. (I'm also going to take this opportunity to suggest that you take a look at my Scratch Pad, where I've been putting together a bit of a FAQ/How-To regarding Win32::OLE and Excel - I'll post it under Tutorials when it's done, comments welcome).

If it's just one file, why automate? Go through each sheet, SaveAs CSV, append them together, and move on.

C-.