TITLE
    XLSperl - use Perl "one-liners" with Microsoft Excel files

DESCRIPTION
  Background
    Perl "one-liners" have a great many uses for quick data processing
    tasks, often replacing the UNIX tools "grep", "sed", and "awk". For
    example, a simple "grep" function can be written as:

     perl -lne '/pattern/ and print' file.txt

    which improves on the standard "grep" function by allowing the extended
    features of Perl regular expressions to be used.

    However, this form of processing is only suitable for data that can be
    read (or needs to be written) in plain text format. XLSperl lets you use
    the same commands to process and create Microsoft Excel files, e.g. the
    following command will "grep" an Excel document:

     XLSperl -lne '/pattern/ and print' file.xls

  Usage
    Basic usage of XLSperl is as follows:

     XLSperl [options] -e 'perl_code' file1.xls file2.xls ... fileX.xls
 
    Additionally Microsoft Excel files can be piped in to XLSperl

     cat file.xls | XLSperl [options] -e 'perl_code'

  Options
    Options to XLSperl mirror the standard options to "perl" - for full
    usage details please read the XLSperl manpage (perldoc XLSperl) after
    installation.


INSTALLATION
    To install XLSperl, use the standard Perl module installation procedure:
    
     perl Makefile.PL
     make
     make test
     make install
    
    XLSperl requires the following modules to be installed:
    
     Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
     Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Simple
     Variable::Alias
    
    Note that binary packages for Windows, Linux x86, and Mac OSX (Intel)
    are available from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/xlstools

SEE ALSO
    XLSperl homepage - <http://perl.jonallen.info/xlstools>
    *Excel on the Command Line* talk slides -
    <http://perl.jonallen.info/talks>
    *Minimal Perl* by Tim Maher - <http://minimalperl.com>

AUTHOR
    Written by Jon Allen <jj@jonallen.info>

COPYRIGHT and LICENSE
    Copyright (C) 2007 Jon Allen

    This software is licensed under the terms of the Artistic License
    version 2.0.

    For full license details, please read the file 'artistic-2_0.txt'
    included with this distribution, or see
    http://www.perlfoundation.org/legal/licenses/artistic-2_0.html

