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 mill

Answer 1

As others said, libreoffice can convert 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 LO 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.

Answer 2

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 3

If .xlsx file has many sheets, -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 data of 2nd sheet in my_file.xlsx.

Answer 4

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