example.xls itself won't work on Debian linux. File not readable triggered by if (substr($this->data, 0, 8) != IDENTIFIER_OLE) {.
Many topics around with dodgy patches to encoding, none of them clearly defined or tested without being mixed with many other unrelated changes.
https://code.google.com/p/php-excel-reader/issues/detail?id=11
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3666412/php-excel-reader-problem-with-utf-8