igelkott has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Are there any (reasonable) ways to parse excel files other than Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, Win32::OLE or methods that rely on these?

I'm experiencing a parsing error with ParseExcel and OLE isn't appropriate for my unix system. I'll probably end up with some sort of data-exchange from windows but wanted to check first if there's something I've overlooked.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Alternative methods for parsing excel
by jeepj (Scribe) on Apr 23, 2008 at 08:27 UTC

    Why not just exporting as a .csv file from Excel, then you have a simple text file with a given delimiter ?

    And if you don't want to save each file as csv in Excel, you could have a simple extractor on windows with OLE, and working on the exported file on Unix.

[reply]
      ... a simple extractor on windows with OLE

      Thanks for the suggestion. This is probably what I'll end up doing.

      I was looking for alternatives because the excel files come from any of 25 windows machines and the results are to be uploaded to a single unix-based server (web/DB).

[reply]
        If you have the time to build something solid, you could imagine having Perl scripts running as services, and on a given signal (timing, remote, user decision...), they export the Excel files to a given text format, and send them via FTP to the Unix box. The script on Unix could monitor the destination directory, and process the files when they arrive (or when the Perl script on Windows notify it via a network connection). With this kind of architecture, your process could be fully automated, and would require no intervention.
[reply]
Re: Alternative methods for parsing excel
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 22, 2008 at 12:03 UTC
[reply]

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