For those of us running on ColdFusion 8,
Ben Nadel's wrapper to the Apache POI classes are still the best way of working with native Excel files.
That said, the POI that ships with CF 8 is old ... very old ... 2004 old in fact and as such it has to be treated very gently and chokes on the slightest bit of Excel cleverness. The most common example of this that I've come across occurs when trying to import a sheet that has Auto Filter / Sort enabled. The Java layer explodes in a mess of unhandled exceptions and steadfastly refuses to read the file.
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