[CentOS] excel parser (preferably perl)?

I'm getting tired of converting spreadsheets that someone else updates to csv so my perl scripts can push the data into a mysql database. Is there a better way? I haven't had much luck with perl-Spreadsheet-ParseExcel (and find it odd that yum prefers the .32 version from epel over .57 from rpmforge anyway). Is the current CPAN version better? Or the equivalent java tools? Or maybe a scripted OpenOffice conversion would be possible.

Needs to deal with both xls and xlsx formats, the odd characters that are confused with quotes even after csv conversion, numbers with $'s and commas embedded, excel's date formatting nonsense, etc.