thank you so much for your inputs. i tried to save the spreadsheet into older 2003 XLS & the error is gone. Below is the hash output using Dumper: 
$VAR1 = \{
            '001' => {
                        'Name' => 'AAA'
                      },
            '002' => {
                        'Name' => 'BBB'
                      }
          };

[download]
My question now is, how I can correctly assign the keys '001', '002', to the correct values 'AAA', 'BBB', respectively?

In reply to Re^2: excel to hash by colox
in thread excel to hash by colox

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