I have an extremely slow script that successfully reads cell values and comments, using OLE via Excel.Application...

I've heard about Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, and wondered if it would be faster, but don't see a way to read the cell comments.... I Data::Dumper'ed the results of Parse, and alas! the comments were not found anywhere!

I've read the docs, but maybe I missed something? WriteExcel allows writing comments... is ReadExcel more limited?

Couldn't find another module that reads XLS files...

Any ideas on where to go next?

The solution

Convert all the data using OpenOffice, and an OpenOffice Calc Macro, which converts the Excel comments to columns, and emits a UTF-8 TSV file. UTF-8 TSV files are a great format, as long as there are no tabs in the data, and Excel makes it reasonably hard to put tabs in the data... OpenOffice can convert to TSV in about 2 minutes, and Perl can read the TSV in about 2 seconds. So for the overall process, from 20 minutes down to 2 minutes!

In reply to Read Excel cell comments? by AlwaysLearning

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