Here some nodes that asked a similar question. Maybe they will help.

Parsing Excel Files?

...
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
my $oBook = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook->Parse($file);
my $oWkS = $oBook->{Worksheet}[0];

for(my $i = $oWkS->{MinRow}+1 ; defined $oWkS->{MaxRow} && $i <= $oWkS
+->{MaxRow} ; $i++) {
    my $oWkC1 = $oWkS->{Cells}[$i][0];
}
...
[download]

If all you need to do is extract raw data from an Excel sheet I find Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple saves typing and is far easier to read. YMMV:

my $xls = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple->read( 'spreadsheet.xls' );
foreach my $sheet ($xls->sheets) {
    while ($sheet->has_data) {  
        print join( ', ', $sheet->next_row ), "\n";
    }
}
[download]

I once wrote up a comparison of two different ways (Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Win32::OLE) to write Excel spreadsheets via Perl. Those may help you, since similar considerations apply when reading Excel files in a Perl program.