This is a simple script for "diffing" Excel files. It is based on xlrd, and should support .xls and .xlsx files.
Usage:
exceldiff [--names] file1.xls file2.xls
The --names option tells the script to match sheets based on their names,
while the default is to match them based on their positions (first sheet of
file1.xls with first sheet of file2.xls, and so on).
Notice the ExcelCompare project has many more options, a better ouput, and support for more types of files.
(The motivation for xlrd_diff was just that ExcelCompare failed on some files)
Also see this StackOverflow question.