From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Sep 24 4:42:13 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from djl01.djl.co.uk (djl01.djl.co.uk [195.58.135.195]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 22F3314C81 for ; Fri, 24 Sep 1999 04:42:08 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from David.Larkin@djl.co.uk) Received: from DJL.co.uk (djl02.djl.co.uk [195.58.135.196]) by djl01.djl.co.uk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id LAA13914; Fri, 24 Sep 1999 11:41:44 GMT Message-ID: <37EB7279.115782E1@DJL.co.uk> Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 13:45:46 +0100 From: David Larkin Organization: DJL Software Consultancy Ltd X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.5-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Chris Shenton Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: converting MS Excel files to some more readable format References: <37EA3D42.A4A8EF80@DJL.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Chris Shenton wrote: > On Thu, 23 Sep 1999 14:46:26 +0000, David Larkin said: > > David> HI, Are there any utilities out there to convert MS Excel files > David> to some more readable format. Excel2xml ? Excel2txt ? > > I haven't used it yet but it looks like it will do the job: > > http://www.gate.net/~ddata/xlHtml/index.htm > > Converts excel to HTML, minus Window-specific brain-damage. Should > recover most of the actual data content without the fluff. > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message Thanks for the replies. I was aware of Star office, but I'm not looking to run Exel or any other spreadsheet. I want a utility to extract the table values, and write them out in a comma seperated format, which I can then manipulate in PERL. Preferably something I can place in a pipe. I'm not looking to load xls files into a package, then do "save as" from the GUI. I could just as easy do that using Excel on a WINTEL box. The utility Chris mentions above sounds promising. But the build didn't work first time. Another option I found is called herbert, it can be found at http://wwwwbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/perl/ It converted my test data to something sensible in HTML. Its written in PERL, so it should be possible to simplify the output to drop the HTML tags. David Larkin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message