Convert xlsx to csv in Linux with command line

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

Use csvkit

in2csv data.xlsx > data.csv

For details check their excellent docs

Answer 4

In bash, I used this libreoffice command to convert all my xlsx files in the current directory:

for i   in *.xlsx; do  libreoffice --headless --convert-to csv "$i" ; done

It takes care of spaces in the filename.

Tried again some years later, and it didn't work. This thread gives some tips, but the quickiest solution was to run as root (or running a sudo libreoffice). Not elegant, but quick.

Use the command scalc.exe in Windows

Answer 5

If you already have a Desktop environment then I'm sure Gnumeric / LibreOffice would work well, but on a headless server (such as Amazon Web Services), they require dozens of dependencies that you also need to install.

I found this Python alternative:

https://github.com/dilshod/xlsx2csv

$ easy_install xlsx2csv
$ xlsx2csv file.xlsx > newfile.csv

Took 2 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.

Answer 6

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!