Reading an Microsoft Excel File

Question

How to read an XLS File (Microsoft Excel) using unix Bash / Korn shell (ksh) script?

Solution

With straight-up shell script you're more than likely sunk, but there are at least three Perl modules that can be used to parse excel spreadsheets and extract data from them.

Fair warning, none of them are particularly pretty, although Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple is probably your best bet for a quick solution.

It's in debian 5.0 (Lenny) as libspreadsheet-parseexcel-simple-perl; Other distributions may have their own naming schemes.

Depending on what you want to do with it a quick perl script should do the trick.

Comments

[Charles Stewart]

What information do you want from it? Can you work with the OOXML .xlsx format instead, which makes life easier.

[chanchal1987]

No. Actualy I am trying to fetch data from a XLS file and trying to do some manupulation on that.

[dyross]

Same opinion. With straight-up shell script probably you'll not succed. Just to give you another option other than Perl, take a look at Apache POI (projects.apache.org/projects/poi.html). It's a JAVA lib that handles MS Office files.