One other option, not on that list, is Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple.

--
John.

You may also want to checkout:
ParseExcel::Simple, which makes... well the name says it all. Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::SaveParser will let you read and write the files if you need to do that. The documentation for all of the above is pretty good. There are also lots of nodes here that will help you out.

Depending on your situation you may also find DBD::Excel useful. It contains DBI drivers for excel.

1. This package comes with activestate Perl. No download, no installation.
2. The code you written does not care the underlying database, it can be sql server, access, text file, fox pro, dbase, andthing that supports ODBC.

use Win32::ODBC;
use Data::Dumper;

$Data = new Win32::ODBC("myExcel") || die "failed\n";
$Data->sql('SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]');
while ($Data->FetchRow()) {
    my %hash = $Data->DataHash();
    print Dumper(\%hash);
}
[download]

It's good, but with certain caveats.

A former employer is making heavy use of it to do signage for a very large, very old Canadian department store. Seems they used to get product tickets sent as XLS, and some poor designer had to print it out, and copy the details back into QuarkXPress by hand. As these tickets were delivered in batches of hundreds at a time, this was slow, and mind-numbing.

With Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, they are now able to write out XPress Tags data of the fields they want, and are able to turn around a job in a couple of hours.

If you are using a Windows box, the previous suggestion to use one of the builtin routines makes sense. On any other platform, though, it's Spreadsheet::ParseExcel is useful.

Not all XLS files are created equal, though. Ones that have been through OpenOffice don't seem to contain any data when parsed by Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, so be careful, test, and test your tests!

--
$,="\n";foreach(split('',"\3\3\3c>\0>c\177cc\0~c~``\0cc\177cc")) {$a++;$_=unpack('B8',$_);tr,01,\40#,;$b[$a%6].=$_};print@b,"\n"

If everything else fails, you can still export your spreadsheet to a tab-separated value text-file and start from there (of course only if your just interested in the data because all formatting and other goodies will be lost)

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

All I need this for is to read data out, saving the user having to save-as tab delimited first (hey, the less they need to do, the better things seems to run ;) ), looks like this will do the trick just fine.

As an aside, my last experience with reading excel was with java, where I had to use some library that actually launched excel to read the file - it worked horribly and crashed all the time; took me several weeks to realize that what I was told were "excel" file were just tab delimited text files with .xls - excel just opened them and converted on the fly. Well, live and learn :)