If you are not doing anything too powerful (seeing as how you used a flat text file, I gather you are not) and you are using the ActiveState build of Perl, you can use the Win32::OLE module with a DSN like in the following:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
=head
    Win32::OLE using a System DSN called testconn
    Objectives: Read stuff from an MSAccess database to prove that thi
+s works
                Error handling tests                
=cut

use OLE;
my $Conn = CreateObject OLE "ADODB.Connection";
$Conn->Open("DSN=testconn");
my $RS = $Conn->Execute("Select * from Customers");

if (!$RS)
{
my $Errors = $Conn->Errors();
my $error;
 foreach $error (keys %$Errors)
{
        print $error->{Description}, "\n";
}
}
while(!$RS->EOF)
{
print $RS->Fields('CustomerID')->value, "\n", $RS->Fields(2)->value,"\
+n";
$RS->movenext();
}
1;
[download]

I suppose you can look around for more information on Win32::OLE on the web. The perldoc includes more examples on how to access Microsoft Excel.

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