I try to do most of my Excel-parsing through DBI or not at all. For one-off jobs I sometimes just dump the spreadsheet to a CSV-file and work with that.

I find spreadsheets too much "free format" and contain too much "eye candy" for PHB's to work with. Most of the time I go the other way around: from a database to a spreadsheet (to give to my database-challenged colleagues).

That being said, I should just give Spreadsheet:ParseExcel::Simple or its underlying Spreadsheet:ParseExcel a whirl. Maybe these modules are fully developped and did not need updating since 2002! (yeah yeah and maybe the moon is made out of green cheese)