Indeed good link Muskrat, the contents of this node give the exact answer.

-Tats


Update: Change link so it doesn't log people out! Thanks Enlil

Update2: Made first update actually work. :)

It should look something like this:

use strict;
use Win32::OLE;

my $ole = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application', 'Quit') or die "$!";
$ole->{Visible} = 1;
my $xls = $ole->{Workbooks}->Open('mr.xls');
my $sheet = $xls->{Sheets}->{Template};
print $sheet->{UsedRange}->{Rows}->{Count}, " rows, ", 
      $sheet->{UsedRange}->{Columns}->{Count}, " columns used.";

__END__
Output:
C:\>perl xls.pl
40 rows, 11 columns used.
[download]

use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple;
use strict;

my $file = shift;
my $rows = 0;
my $cols = 0;
my $xls  = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple->read($file);
my @sheets = $xls->sheets;
while ($sheets[0]->has_data) {
   $rows++;
   my @data = $sheets[0]->next_row;
   if (@data > $cols) {
      $cols = @data;
   }
}
print "Rows: " . $rows, "\n";
print "Cols: " . $cols, "\n";
[download]

I think you'll need to be more precise about the structure of the spreadsheet. Are all the rows/columns containing data contiguous? In general you can have some 64k and 256 rows in an excel spreadsheet, max.