LPM: Reading from Excel with Perl

[Rich Bowen]

ken.rietz at asbury.edu wrote:
> 
> Hi --
> 
> I was wondering if any of you have had experience trying to read
> data from an Excel spreadsheet using Perl on a Win machine.
> My initial thought is to use the ODBC interface. Is there any
> better way? Is it going to be more frustration than it's worth?
> I can currently export the data as tab-delimited ASCII, and pull
> it apart with split, and it works fine. I was hoping to eliminate
> the export step, though.

The two ways that I've done this are DBI::ODBC and OLE. OLE was rather a
pain, and had the rather large overhead of actually launching the Excel
executable. DBI is somewhat dain bramaged in that you have to know row
and column locations to do selects, but seemed to work pretty well if
you can get past that.

Rich
-- 
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