If you are going to dump into a database anyway, it would seem simpler to to treat your input sources as databases also. I suggested DBD::AnyData becuase it supports multiple formats. It can import from any DBI accessible data source, including CSV, many different text formats, and Excel (with DBD::Excel). This means that you can use DBI to read all of your data regardless of its format and to write your data. In a situation such as you are describing that makes a lot more sense then using one module to read Excel, another to read CSV, a third to read text format foo and a fourth to read text format bar and a fifth to write the data. Actually DBD::AnyData makes use of those other modules (e.g. it would be using the excellent Spreadsheet::ParseExcel to actually read the Excel sheet or the excellent XML::Twig to read XML files), but provides you with a single interface to those modules and to the other parsing modules so that your script only needs one interface rather than one interface per format.