How to read an excel file and create a sparse matrix from it using c only? [on hold]

This is my first question in stack overflow and I apologize for sounding so newbie like. I have been given an assignment in college to read an excel spreadsheet containing a sparse matrix and then store the data in a linked list. I am unable to read the data from an excel sheet whereas i found it quite easy to do so from a word document. Can anybody please give me a source code on this aspect. Any help is highly appreciated.Thank you.