[Rd] Excel -> *.CSV in Unix (Linux) command line?

[Martin Maechler]

Thanks got to Brian Ripley, John Chambers, Tony Rossini, Setzer Woodrow,
Dirk Eddelbuettel, Uwe Ligges, Detlef Steuer, and Kurt Hornik (in
"historical" order) who have answered very helpfully!

I was interested primarily in "commandline" solutions inside Unix/Linux,
and hence not ODBC inside windows.  The other answers fall into three groups :

1) newer Perl versions (newer than Redhat 6.2 or Debian potato) have modules
   Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and built on that DBI::Excel
   {as "libspreadsheet-parseexcel-perl" and "libdbi-excel-perl" in Debian,
    thanks to Dirk}.

   Dirk has also done a done a perl script "xls2csv" built on the above,
   sent to Brian Ripley who forwarded it to me.  
   Dirk, maybe you'd post the latest version of that here as well, or give us
   a pointer where that is available?

2) There's a GPL package "catdoc" with primary aim of 
   "cat *.doc files" (i.e. `look at' M$-Word files).  The catdoc package is
   written in C and also has an "xls2csv" (same name as above script!) program.
   catdoc is in Debian or available at  http://www.fe.msk.ru/~vitus/catdoc/
   Looking at that webpage however seems to indicate that development
   somehow stopped end of 1999 (a "2k" bug ? :-).

I've not yet compared the two xls2csv versions now potentially available
to me, one reason being that I'd have to upgrade perl (or Redhat) first.
At the moment, I'd tend to use the perl based solution.

3) John Chambers mentioned Duncan's  `R Gnumeric' interface --- the only
   R-related answer--- at http://www.omegahat.org/RGnumeric/  
   It is fairly new, but I'll definitely am looking at it, as well.

>>>>> "MM" == Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:

    MM> A colleague has a dozen of excel sheets and also expects to get
    MM> updates regularly.  He could open these in M$-Excel and export as
    MM> *.csv manually, "bring back to Unix" and then read into R.  Of
    MM> course there must be options to start programming this in something
    MM> like visual basic, but we wouldn't to really want to...

    MM> We also know that probably Gnumeric could do the job (since the xls
    MM> files are said to be simple ...), but as far as I know that also
    MM> does only work manually (and via GUI).  "gnumeric --help" does not
    MM> suggest a command line version.  Are there other options (i.e. free
    MM> software programs) to use from the command line (i.e. also in a
    MM> shell script or from inside R)?

    MM> Since this is not really an R topic, please reply to my e-mail
    MM> only, not to R-help, and I'll summarize.  Thanks in advance!

Thanks a lot, once more!
-- 
Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/
Seminar fuer Statistik, ETH-Zentrum  LEO D10	Leonhardstr. 27
ETH (Federal Inst. Technology)	8092 Zurich	SWITZERLAND
phone: x-41-1-632-3408		fax: ...-1228			<><
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