blackadder,
I understand what it is like to be in a hurry, but taking two minutes on CPAN would have turned up Spreadsheet::ParseExcel. TFM is quite friendly.

Cheers - L~R

Update: Ok, since I read TFM just to be sure it was possible, here is 1 way to do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

my $xls = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new();
my $xls_book = $xls->Parse( 'example.xls' );
my $xls_worksheet = $xls_book->{Worksheet}[0];

# B1 - B3
my @vals = map { $xls_worksheet->Cell( $_ , 1 )->Value } 0 .. 2;
print "$_\n" for @vals;
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