(Apologies for not being able to supply the data - the only file I have is company sensitive)

Sample code piece 1:

use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Parser;

my $p = new XML::Parser(
             Style => 'Object',
             ErrorContext => 2,
             );
$p->parsefile('Spreadsheet.xls');
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Sample code piece 2 (lifted from Merlyn's site):

use IO::File;
use Data::Dumper;
use HTML::Parser;

my $count = 0;

my $fh = new IO::File("/home/graq/spreadsheet.xls");
  my @state;
  my $p = HTML::Parser->new
    (
     xml_mode => 1,
     start_h =>
     [sub {
        my ($tagname, $attr) = @_;
        push @state, $tagname;
        ## We are beginning state "@state"
        print '::'."@state".'::'."\n";
      }, "tagname, attr"],
     text_h =>
     [sub {
        my ($text) = @_;
        ## We see content within state "@state"
      }, "dtext"],
     end_h =>
     [sub {
        my ($tagname) = @_;
        ## We are ending state "@state"
        pop @state;
      }, "tagname"],
    );
  $p->parse_file($fh);
  $p->eof;
[download]