You need to have the real parser installed. Spreadsheet::Read is just a unifying frontend API to all the supported parsers. This is like using DBI without knowing what DBD is used: your programm does use DBI; and DBI->connect decides what DBD to load. Likewise for Spreadsheet::Read.

So to parse .xslx you have to install Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX and then you do somthing like:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Spreadsheet::Read;

my $book  = Spreadsheet::Read->new ("file.xlsx");
my $sheet = $book->sheet (1);
my $a3    = $sheet->cell ("A3");
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