The data being returned is in Excel's UTF-16 Unicode format.

You will need to specify a Unicode formatter in the parse() method to handle the data. Something like this:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
  
    use warnings;
    use strict;
    use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
    use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtJapan;

    my $filename  = 'file.xls';
    my $parser    = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new();
    my $formatter = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtJapan->new();
    my $workbook  = $parser->parse($filename, $formatter);

    if ( !defined $workbook ) {
        die "Parsing error: ", $parser->error(), ".\n";
    }

    # Set your output encoding to something like this.
    binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';


    for my $worksheet ( $workbook->worksheets() ) {

        print "Worksheet name: ", $worksheet->get_name(), "\n\n";

        my ( $row_min, $row_max ) = $worksheet->row_range();
        my ( $col_min, $col_max ) = $worksheet->col_range();

        for my $row ( $row_min .. $row_max ) {
            for my $col ( $col_min .. $col_max ) {

                my $cell = $worksheet->get_cell( $row, $col );
                next unless $cell;

                print "    Row, Col    = ($row, $col)\n";
                print "    Value       = ", $cell->value(),       "\n"
+;
                print "    Unformatted = ", $cell->unformatted(), "\n"
+;
                print "\n";
            }
        }
    }

    __END__
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Ignore the fact that the formatter is called FmtJapan, it is also a general purpose Unicode handler.

--
John.