Lots of chart data originates in Excel, so it is only natural to want to directly read Excel files. In general, reading Excel files can be complicated and error prone. Many of the tools available for ActionScript are also fairly experimental. So for most applications, you will probably want to use CSV or XML files as mentioned in the previous recipes, or JSON as we'll discuss in the next recipe.
However, in circumstances where you have good control over the version(s) of Excel used and the layout of the Excel spreadsheet, reading them directly could be a huge time-saver for your users.
For this recipe, we will use the freely available ActionScript 3 XLSX reader by Ben Morrow. It can be downloaded from the GitHub page, https://github.com/childoftv/as3-xlsx-reader. If you are comfortable using Git and GitHub, it is easiest to clone the repository on your local drive. If you don't have the Git software installed, it is best to use the Downloads link...