I feel you. Cleaning data is always a bitch. That said, if you are dealing with excel, you can use Spreadsheet-ParseExcel and Spreadsheet-WriteExcel to have

I feel you. Cleaning data is always a bitch. That said, if you are dealing with excel, you can use Spreadsheet-ParseExcel and Spreadsheet-WriteExcel to have perl handle excel .xls files directly (though I'm not sure about xls files including embedded vba macros).