Well the 'U*' didn't work, the code is parsing the xls file and adding it to a tab in another xls. Spreadsheet::WriteExcel complains about the characters being to wide. I think there has to be something I can set that will avoid this warning. Parse is defaulting to 'C*', because it is not UTF8, as far as I can tell. I saw something about setting LANG=en_us.UTF8. I'll do some more searching, since I really don't know to much about UTF8, in case you haven't noticed. :-)