Hi jianwt
Thank you for thanking me but please don't thank me yet as I am going to bother you (just a little)

(feel free to ignore if you can't be bothered)
You might have a very perfect and valid reason not to use fpspreadsheet (I should have mentioned that in my initial; reaction)
I mentioned the example because that uses fpspreadsheet in a non-visual way and using low resources (you could even make a command line program without using any GUI with that functionality).
But what I would like to know, if you would be so kind and be able to answer that question, if that is what was bothering you about using fpspreadsheet (e.g. you got the notion that fpspreadsheet could only be used by using a GUI).
I ask that question because to my knowledge there is not another unit/library (3th party or otherwise) that is able to handle/read excel xls files. But perhaps something else is ground for you to initially discard fpspreasheet. I would appreciate if you could share your knowledge on that so that I can take it into consideration (because I myself am not familiar with fpspreadsheet).
TIA