=head1 NAME

Spreadsheet::Read - Meta-Wrapper for reading spreadsheet data

=head1 SYNOPSIS

  use Spreadsheet::Read;
  my $ref = ReadData ("file.xls");

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Spreadsheet::Read offers a uniformed wrapper to Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
and Spreadheet::ReadSXC to give the end-user a single point of view to
various types of spreadsheets and deal with these in a transparent way.

For more thorough documentation please refer to the perl documentation
in the module in pod format, or

  $ man Spreadsheet::Read

after installation.

=head1 INSTALLATION

  $ perl Makefile.PL
  $ make
  $ make test
  $ make install

If the C<make test> warns you in the xls tests, read the message and
apply the generated patch. Spreadsheet::ParseExcel has a small bug in
the parsing of the default format regarding UTF-8.

This module requires perl-5.8.1 or newer. It might still work under
perl-5.8.0 or perl-5.6.x, but only if Encode is also available. The
code might need some minor changes.

Recent changes can be (re)viewed in the public GIT repository at
https://github.com/Tux/Spreadsheet-Read

Feel free to clone your own copy:

 $ git clone https://github.com/Tux/Spreadsheet-Read Spreadsheet-Read

or get it as a tgz:

 $ wget --output-document=Spreadsheet-Read-git.tgz \
	   'https://github.com/Tux/Spreadsheet-Read/archive/master.tar.gz'

=head1 TOOLS

Installing this module will optionally (default is yes) also install some
useful tools that use Spreadsheet::Read. At least two are know to cause a
possible name clash:

 * xls2csv also exists as https://metacpan.org/release/KEN/xls2csv-1.06
   Mine existed before that script, and this version dates from 2005
 * ssdiff also exists in the gnumeric package with similar functionality

=head1 TODO

  * Make tests for scripts/xlscat
  * Support Parsers native module options
  * Check if Tk is installed before asking if ss2tk is wanted
  * Test diagnostics output
  * Support Spreadsheet::Perl
  * Support Data::XLSX::Parser
  * Steal options from other CSV/Spreadsheet tools to implement in
    xlscat and xlsgrep

=head1 AUTHOR

H.Merijn Brand <[email protected]>

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2005-2024 H.Merijn Brand

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.

=cut