Dear maehrus, I really appreciate your response. The problem is that the Whole cell content is missing in my test file if there are some non-english characters in the cell. The CPAN do not allow me to paste the sample cell values with the non-english characters. Can I email the xls file as a sample to you? my email address is stevenshen66@yahoo.com. My OS is 'SunOS hera 5.8 Generic_117350-22 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-880' Thank you so much for help. Steven Shen