What is the best way to read in excel files on windows using perl?

I am on a winxp machine, with activestate installed. Since my perl is better than my vba, and I like perl better than vba, but I work with excel a lot, I have done some research on the various ways to deal with excel using perl.

spreadsheet::writeexcel is installed and working nicely. There are lots of little examples included which demo how it works, which I like a lot. But this is mainly for writing excel files.

What about reading excel in? I will be munging in many autogenerated excel click reports from various search engines we're working with. (Some have cvs export but not all, or I would be going with text::xsv, which seems a little easier.)

Unfortunately spreadsheet::parseexcel doesn't seem to have any examples included :( so I couldn't easily verify that everything works, or how well it works. Hoping to get some feedback here!

Cultured Perl: Reading and writing Excel files with Perl claims that on windows

"Win32::OLE is the easiest way to get Excel data right now, although the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel modules are catching up."

Is this still true? (Article is a year old.)

Should I use spreadsheet::parseexcel or is it still too beta?

In reply to Best way to read excel files? by tphyahoo

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