I'm looking for a way to convert xlsx files to csv files on Linux.
I do not want to use PHP/Perl or anything like that since I'm looking at processing several millions of lines, so I need something quick. I found a program on the Ubuntu repos called xls2csv but it will only convert xls (Office 2003) files (which I'm currently using) but I need support for the newer Excel files.
Any ideas?
The Gnumeric spreadsheet application comes with a command line utility called ssconvert that can convert between a variety of spreadsheet formats:
$ ssconvert Book1.xlsx newfile.csv
Using exporter Gnumeric_stf:stf_csv
$ cat newfile.csv
Foo,Bar,Baz
1,2,3
123.6,7.89,
2012/05/14,,
The,last,Line
To install on Ubuntu:
apt-get install gnumeric
To install on Mac:
brew install gnumeric
for f in *.csv; do ssconvert "$f" "${f%.csv}.xlsx"; done The LibreOffice method could probably process other formats, but I could not make it work (it would simply open a blank file every time, even with the --headless argument).
apt-get install gnumeric --no-install-recommends. The only drawback is that it fires lots of warnings GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon when running. A simple ssconvert oldfile.xlsx newfile.csv > /dev/null 2>&1 will do the trick.
-S flag to write multiple sheets. Each goes to its own file.
ssconvert -O "separator=;" -T Gnumeric_stf:stf_assistant file.xlsx fd://1.If you already have a desktop environment then I'm sure Gnumeric or LibreOffice would work well, but on a headless server (e.g. any cloud-based environment), they require dozens of dependencies that you also need to install.
I found this Python alternative: xlsx2csv
easy_install xlsx2csv
xlsx2csv file.xlsx > newfile.csv
It took two seconds to install and works like a charm.
If you have multiple sheets, you can export all at once, or one at a time:
xlsx2csv file.xlsx --all > all.csv
xlsx2csv file.xlsx --all -p '' > all-no-delimiter.csv
xlsx2csv file.xlsx -s 1 > sheet1.csv
He also links to several alternatives built in Bash, Python, Ruby, and Java.
IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/prettytable-0.7.2-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/top_level.txt'). Now that I think about it, I got the same error with csvkit.
xlsx2csv package, so you don't need to manually install it through easy_install but can use your package manager.
sudo easy_install xlsx2csv
xlsx2csv is but it seems to be actively maintained and compared to installing Gnumeric on macOS via Homebrew which involves more than 30 dependencies and LibreOffice which is a several hundred MB download xlsx2csv has zero(!) dependencies, comes at just 50 KB and worked perfectly for my use case (converting the output of PaddleOCR to csv). Either install it with pip install xlsx2csv or download the latest release from the Repository and run xlsx2csv.py.You can do this with LibreOffice:
libreoffice --headless --convert-to csv $filename --outdir $outdir
For reasons not clear to me, you might need to run this with sudo. You can make LibreOffice work with sudo without requiring a password by adding this line to you sudoers file:
users ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: libreoffice
/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to csv $filename worked on OS X for me.
--convert-to "csv:Text - txt - csv (StarCalc):44,34,76,1,1/1". See open office wiki for details.
brew install csvkit. And done.In Bash, I used this LibreOffice command (executable libreoffice) to convert all my .xlsx files in the current directory:
for i in *.xlsx; do libreoffice --headless --convert-to csv "$i" ; done
Close all your LibreOffice open instances before executing, or it will fail silently.
The command takes care of spaces in the filename.
I tried it again some years later, and it didn't work. This question gives some tips, but the quickest solution was to run as root (or running a sudo libreoffice). It is not elegant, but quick.
Use the command scalc.exe in Windows.
scalc.exe rather than libreoffice. Worked for me today on current stable LO version.
Another option would be to use R via a small Bash wrapper for convenience:
xlsx2txt(){
echo '
require(xlsx)
write.table(read.xlsx2(commandArgs(TRUE)[1], 1), stdout(), quote=F, row.names=FALSE, col.names=T, sep="\t")
' | Rscript --vanilla - $1 2>/dev/null
}
xlsx2txt file.xlsx > file.txt
If the .xlsx file has many sheets, the -s flag can be used to get the sheet you want. For example:
xlsx2csv "my_file.xlsx" -s 2 second_sheet.csv
second_sheet.csv would contain the data of the second sheet in my_file.xlsx.
-a will export all sheets. 👍Using the Gnumeric spreadsheet application which comes which a commandline utility called ssconvert is indeed super simple:
find . -name '*.xlsx' -exec ssconvert -T Gnumeric_stf:stf_csv {} \;
and you're done!
You can use executable libreoffice to convert your .xlsx files to csv:
libreoffice --headless --convert-to csv ABC.xlsx
Argument --headless indicates that we don't need GUI.
If you are OK to run Java command line then you can do it with Apache POI HSSF's Excel Extractor. It has a main method that says to be the command line extractor. This one seems to just dump everything out. They point out to this example that converts to CSV. You would have to compile it before you can run it but it too has a main method so you should not have to do much coding per se to make it work.
Another option that might fly but will require some work on the other end is to make your Excel files come to you as Excel XML Data or XML Spreadsheet of whatever MS calls that format these days. It will open a whole new world of opportunities for you to slice and dice it the way you want.
As others said, executable libreoffice can convert Excel files (.xls) files to CSV. The problem for me was the sheet selection.
This LibreOffice Python script does a fine job at converting a single sheet to CSV.
Usage is:
./libreconverter.py File.xls:"Sheet Name" output.csv
The only downside (on my end) is that --headless doesn't seem to work. I have a LibreOffice window that shows up for a second and then quits.
That's OK with me; it's the only tool that does the job rapidly.
You can use script getsheets.py. Add dependencies first:
pip3 install pandas xlrd openpyxl
Then call the script: python3 getsheets.py <file.xlsx>
