NAME

xls2tsv

SYNOPSIS

xls2tsv file.xls > file.tsv

DESCRIPTION

This is a fairly simple-minded tool to extract content from Excel spreadsheet files and print the cell data in plain-text tab-delimited format. The output preserves one or more consecutive empty rows a single blank line; within non-empty rows, each non-row-final empty cell is preserved as a tab character.

We loop over the "worksheet" pages in the given .xls file, and output a ";;; sheetname" line, followed by a blank line, to mark the start of each one.

When cell data content is found to be unicode, it is printed out in utf8 encoding. Leading and trailing spaces are discarded; any cell found to contain only whitespace characters (including tab,   and other "wide" space characters available in unicode) is treated as empty. Apart from these points, cell contents are output exactly as found.

Cell and string formatting features are not preserved; changes of foreground/background color and font style (bold, italic, underline, etc) are ignored.

AUTHOR

David Graff (at ldc.upenn.edu)