Actually it's quite easy to get UTF-8 through Win32::OLE out of Excel. All you have to do is tell Excel (or OLE, I'm not sure) that you want UTF-8. Let me pull out some old project code... 
use Win32::OLE 'CP_UTF8';
Win32::OLE->Option(CP => CP_UTF8);

[download]
With that, all data you get out of Excel should be in UTF-8.

In reply to Re: reading Unicode from Excel by bart
in thread reading Unicode from Excel by nagilum

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