Bug #24543 for Spreadsheet-ParseExcel-Simple: reading Number from spreadsheet comes up as "GENERAL"

hello there, hope you're well! first, thanks so much for the work on your module! Its been really simple and perfect for my use - i've been reading meta-information for audio wav files from Excel and using that info to encode and tag the audio files as mp3s. However i've ran into a problem today and wondered if you would quickly know the answer - One of the columns i'm trying to read is a simple number, the track number for the track in question - however, my @array always returns that columns information simply as "GENERAL". I've been trying to change the format of the cells, but it seems nothing i do makes any change to the returned values. All the textual fields are completely fine, but it seems any numerical field is returned with this GENERAL, which i'm assuming is something do with the cell's format. Anything come to mind? Am i doing anything stupid? My script is pretty simple and just follows the module example: foreach my $sheet ($xls->sheets) { while ($sheet->has_data) { $rowcount += 1; my @data = $sheet->next_row; print "Data back is @data\n\n"; my $artist = $data[36]; my $display_artist = $data[37]; my $label = "Soma"; my $catno = $data[16]; my $release_title = $data[11]; my $track_title = $data[34]; my $track_no = $data[32]; next if ($rowcount < 4); if ($rowcount > 556 ) { last; } print "+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++\n\n"; print "Artist: $artist\n"; print "Display_Artist: $display_artist\n"; print "Label: $label\n"; print "Catno: $catno\n"; print "Release Title: $release_title\n"; print "Trackno: $track_no\n"; print "Track Title: $track_title\n"; } } any pointers or help would be much appreciated. I can send on an example Excel file if that would help. cheers! thorsten sideb0ard