Personally I prefer Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple over Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.

my $xls = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple->read('spreadsheet.xls');
  foreach my $sheet ($xls->sheets) {
     while ($sheet->has_data) {  
         my @data = $sheet->next_row;
     }
  }
[download]

You could then probably use something like XML::Writer to dump the parsed data to XML.

-- vek --