If you have strings in the first row of the worksheet that you are using for names you will have to store them when they are encountered and reuse them later.

If you just wish to find the column letter based on the column number you can use the int2col() function from Spreadsheet::parseExcel::Utility.

--
John.

The problem is that using a cell handler calls your cell handler as each cell is read. You don't really need to do that under normal circumstances, but if you do, then try something like:

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

my %CellData; # Key1=workbook, Key2=Row, Key3=column

my $parse_excel = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new(
        CellHandler   => \&cell_handler,
        NotSetCell    => 1
);

my $workbook = $parse_excel->Parse('file.xls');

# Now that we've parsed the sheet, we can access any data we like,
# So let's print cell C1 on sheet "FOO"
print $CellData{FOO}{C}{1}, "\n";

sub cell_handler {
    # Cell information passed to us
    my ($WB, $IDX, $R, $C, $Cell) = @_;

    # Build our hash keys
    my $SheetName = $WB->worksheet($IDX)->get_name();
    my $ColName = numToColumnName($C);
    my $RowName = $R;
    $CellData{$SheetName}{$ColName}{$RowName} = $Cell->{_Value};
}

sub numToColumnName {
    my $C = shift;
    my $colName = '';
    if ($C>25) {
        $colName = substr('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', $C/26, 1);
        $C = $C % 26;
    }
    $colName .= substr('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', $C, 1);
}
[download]

(Note: Untested!)

Of course, if you don't need to use a cell handler, you can just use the example in the first page of the documentation to access the data by sheet / row / column...

...roboticus

The idea here is to read this xls file and get the values into a database, the columns will not necessarily be called C1 to C4, it will be called something else, that's why I asked about passing the column names to get is value. Any ideas?

I maintain Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.

There aren't any column names in an Excel file so you can't use column names to access any data.

--
John.