[CentOS] excel parser (preferably perl)?

  On 10/18/10 3:13 PM, Les Mikesell 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.

I suspect it would be easiest to implement this as a set of Excel macros 
that connect to your mysql with ODBC and write the data directly to your 
database.