Face it, even though Excel is a spreadsheet, the vast majority of users think it’s a database. Sure, why not? It’s got columns and rows and you can type data into it. Isn’t that what a database is?
In the olden days it was common to let people think this way, and then just dump the data out to a tab-delimited file and use Perl to rip through it. That was the olden days, because now we’re used to the new days, and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
The Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module makes it pretty easy, and those people can keep sticking their data into Excel, and we’ll keep right on ripping it out with Perl. (Thanks Kawai Takanori!)
Even after all these years, when PHP and Java got bigger and stronger, and Ruby showed up and what not, Perl is still a great language for processing text and data, mainly due to the huge amount of useful modules available.