I am in occasional email contact with Takanori Kawai the author of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel. The last time was about a year ago when I took over the maintenance of OLE::Storage_Lite.

As far as I know, the author is not actively developing Spreadsheet::ParseExcel (he had stopped everything a while back to write a book on the DBI).

I think that it would be a good idea for someone to take over maintenance of the module. Not least of all to apply some patches for greater Unicode support under Perl 5.8.

--
John.