ReadOSM is an open source library to extract valid data from within an Excel (.xls) spreadsheet.
FreeXL design goals:

• to be simple and lightweight
• to be stable, robust and efficient
• to be easily and universally portable
• completely ignoring any GUI-related oddity

Note that the final goal means that ReadOSM ignores at all fonts, sizes and alignments, and most formats. It ignores Pivot Table, Charts, Formulas, Visual Basic macros and so on. ReadOSM is structurally simple and quite light-weight (typically 20K of object code, stripped).

ReadOSM is licensed under the MPL tri-license terms; you are free to choose the best-fit license between:

• the MPL 1.1
• the GPL v2.0 or any subsequent version
• the LGPL v2.1 or any subsequent version