I gave you a ++ for your suggestion, but you might want to mention that it's not always a good solution. Some cases where it's not so good:

• You're on UNIX, Linux or other non-windows server.
• You don't want to worry about spending an Excel license on a server.

Then, of course, some people don't trust "automation" so much. Since most applications are written for a human to "drive", there isn't much demand to make them all "automation friendly". So an unexpected dialog box can pop up and hang your application until someone logs into the console to dismiss it. In the early years, automating Excel was a pain, so I opted for Spreadsheet::ParseExcel. I imagine that automating Excel is probably a lot nicer. But I haven't had any reasons to change yet...