Cultured Perl: Reading and Writing Excel Files with Perl
By Teodor Zlatanov2004-05-01
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
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In 2000, Takanori Kawai and John McNamara produced the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel modules and posted them on CPAN, which made it possible, though not easy, to extract data from Excel files on any platform.
As we'll see later, Win32::OLE still offers a simpler, more reliable solution if you're working with Windows, and is recommended by the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module for more powerful manipulations of data and worksheets. Win32::OLE comes with the ActiveState Perl toolkit, and can be used to drive a lot of other Windows applications through OLE. Note that to use this module, you still need to have the Excel engine (usually installed with Excel itself) installed and licensed on your machine.
The applications that need to parse Excel data number in the thousands, but here are a few examples: exporting Excel to CSV, interacting with a spreadsheet stored on a shared drive, moving financial data to a database for reporting, and analyzing data not provided in any other format.
To follow along with the examples given here, you must have Perl 5.6.0 installed on your system. Preferably, your system should be a recent (2000 or later) mainstream UNIX installation (Linux, Solaris, BSD). Although the examples may work with earlier versions of Perl and UNIX, and with other operating systems, you should consider cases where they fail to function as exercises to solve.
Tutorial Pages:
» Using the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel Modules
» Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
» Windows Example: Parsing
» Linux Example: Parsing
» Conclusion
» Resources
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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