Coincidentally, I was doing an app that interfaces with Excel sheets just yesterday.. all of these options are available..

there is also a somewhat more obscure workaround, where I open the Excel sheet as an OLE container and call the SaveAsCSV method... then use Text:CSV (Text::CSV_XS) to manipulate the data. One would have to convert the sheets offline.. I rejected this because I didn't really like to handle OLE inside a CGI app, just thought it might give me performance issues later on..

Spreadsheet::ParseExcel is quite good.. a new release was submitted to CPAN on the 17th of March (0.18, I do believe), and it allows display of an Excel sheet as a multi dimensional array..

Just a bit of insight on what I've done with Excel sheets.. if you want to see any examples (admittedly, almost all of it is off man pages ;o) just let me know..