Reading and Converting Excel Spreadsheet to CSV in Unix

[Danny Besmonte]

Good day everyone. I stumbled upon a requirement to grab a source file in Excel format and output to a csv file. I’ve been doing my research here and I saw tcl “tcom” package, however, that’s for windows OS only. Alternatively, there are shell scripts out there, but I don’t want to install those into our existing Linux OS. I saw some search results in this forum, but some are old, points to links that don’t exist, referencing scripts that are not there, and so I just decided to post this inquiry.

Hopefully, either I get an enlightenment to push back and let the group giving us the source file deal with converting their spreadsheets to .csv before sending to Cloverleaf (like Microsoft can change their .xlsx file anytime and the code will stop working), or somebody can share if they’ve done this before and point me to the right direction how to do this.

Thank you.

Topic

[Charlie Bursell]

It would certainly be easier if the Widows side could do the conversion and pass it to you as CSV.  All they have to do is save as CSV.

With that said, I ran across a thing called gnumeric.  I have never tried it so I don’t know if it will do what you want.  It has command line options so I would think you could exec it from Tcl

Gnumeric

Software

Description

Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released on 31 December 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU General Public License; it is intended to replace proprietary spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel

[Author]

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