You could try opening the spreadsheet with Excel, and saving it as an XML spreadsheet. The XML should be much easier to parse.

I just did a test using Excel 2003, and the cell comments are preserved. Here is the relevant portion of the XML. (I've changed the whitespace and removed font tags for clarity) 

<Row>
  <Cell>
    <Data ss:Type="String">This is a cell</Data>
    <Comment ss:Author="Throckmorton P. Ruddygore">
      <ss:Data xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
        <B>Throckmorton P. Ruddygore:</B>&#10;
        This is a comment
      </ss:Data>
    </Comment>
  </Cell>
</Row>

[download]

If you have an inconveniently large number of spreadsheets to work with, perhaps you could use OLE to automate the conversion to XML.

cat >~/.sig </dev/interesting

In reply to Re: Read Excel cell comments? by misterwhipple
in thread Read Excel cell comments? by AlwaysLearning

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