Were that the case I'd expect he would be getting an error trying to call the method Value on an undefined value (at least a quick test referencing a cell from an empty sheet in an existing xls file returns undef for me and $sheet->{Cells} is an arrayref with the 0th item being an empty arrayref (so [ [] ])). Never the less you might want to sanity check your indexen versus $sheet->{MaxRow} and $sheet->{MaxCol} (and/or the minimums if you're truly paranoid :), and also check that you've got a defined value before attempting to manipulate it.

my $value;
if( my $cell = $sheet->{Cell}->[$r]->[$c] ) {
  $value = $cell->Value();
}
[download]

I tried this option. I am doing a sanity check on my excel in the actual program. The script pasted is just a part of it. Interesting thing here is...when I copied data from a cell that is returning me right results to that particular cell. And ran the script. It is giving good result. For ex: Cell (12,11) has 1.29 and the script returns 1.29. So, I copied the 1.29 into my 33,13 cell which is causing the error. And ran the script...it returned 1.29. I am not able to understand the issue here. Please advise.

Was cell (12, 11) also formatted to "Accounting"? Maybe the dump is Excel's internal representation of an "accounting" field. Also, it might be helpful if you tell us exactly what value '4.10' is being translated to.