My personal recommendation is always to do the importing in a seperate "import" entity that is a direct copy of the excel that is being uploaded. That way you can always do error handling & data validations without having your transactional database directly used.
Then in the importing script to move from the import entity to your normal entities you can easily retrieve the referenced object based on the data that you import, and you can delete all imported data afterwards.
Other option is that you set the Type to Reference, that way you can directly set the reference based on the attribute in the colum.
Typically parsing is being used to clean up data (f.e. date stamps), or f.e. to set enums based on different string values.