I'm having this same problem with a file saved in .xls format from OpenOffice (note saved in ms excel format). Googling seems to show that the problem was fixed a couple years ago by the debian folks so why hasn't the fix been applied to the CPAN source yet?

Note that I found a suitable workaround to be:

I'd much rather see the problem fixed properly in the module, though, than have to apply that workaround to all my code.

More info and patch for this problem can be found here and here.