Excel imports with Perl did pretty well for me. I was pretty careful on insisting on some rules for the sheet data and enforced them strictly with decent debug

Excel imports with Perl did pretty well for me. I was pretty careful on insisting on some rules for the sheet data and enforced them strictly with decent debugging info for the users. I still think Robustness principle[1] is a croc and strictly controlling inputs is one key to happiness. It also, frankly, helps your users in the long run by giving them exactly what they want and it actually cuts down on the amount of thought they have to put into it. Chaos and disappointment do not make a good user experience. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle