[CentOS] excel parser (preferably perl)?

[Kevin Thorpe]

  On 19/10/2010 17:48, Toby Bluhm wrote:
> On 10/19/2010 11:17 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 10/19/2010 9:34 AM, Todd Denniston wrote:
>>>> 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.
This might be coming out of left field.... but I have an Excel add-in 
which, among other things, packs up Excel spreadsheets and posts the 
content in blocks to a web server as csv. The other clever bit is that 
it works on column headings so that it doesn't break if users 
add/remove/switch columns. It also provides an acknowledgement mechanism 
which colours and comments a cell for each line so you can notify if the 
line looks borked to the server.

It does the opposite as well. Using an embedded web browser to find and 
select info then the server presents an html table which the add-in 
unpacks into the spreadsheet.

If anyone wants it then please ask off-list. I'll need to strip some of 
the functionality out as it's confidential business process info.