converting an Excel (xls) file to a comma separated (csv) file without the GUI

Question

Is there a simple way to translate an XLS to a CSV formatted file without starting the Excel windowed application?

I need to process some Excel XLS workbooks with sc

Answer 1

You can do it with Alacon - command-line utility for Alasql database.

It works with Node.js, so you need to install Node.js and then Alasql package:

> npm install alasql

To convert Excel file to CVS (ot TSV) you can enter:

> node alacon "SELECT * INTO CSV('mydata.csv', {headers:true}) FROM XLS('mydata.xls', {headers:true})"

Alacon supports other type of conversions (CSV, TSV, TXT, XLSX, XLS) and SQL language constructions (see User Manual for examples).