I needed the capability to convert Microsoft Excel spreadsheets sent to my email account on a Linux system to a form I could work with on that system. The spreadsheets contain just email addresses that I need to put into a text file for a mailing list on the Linux email server. I wanted something simple and straightforward to use. I didn't need a lot of bells and whistles, just the capability to convert the data in the .xls spreadsheet file to a text or CSV file. I found antixls, which can be downloaded from the author's site at http://www.af0.net/~dan/?antixls, which suited my needs perfectly.

Antixls is a small Perl script that can display the information in a spreadsheet in a number of modes, including in ASCII art format, "linear" (unformatted), CSV, and linearly with cell indices, which is the default mode. The antixls Perl program provides a wrapper for Kawai Takanori's Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module.

Help on using the script can be viewed by typing antixls --help.

Usage: antixls [options...] excelfile1 [excelfile2 ...]
General Options:
--help                  This help information
--version               Show version information
--formatted             Display sheets in ASCII-art table
--linear                Display sheets in "linear" (unformatted) mode
--csv                   Display sheets in CSV mode
--indexed               Display sheets linearly with cell indices (default)

I wanted to convert the membership spreadsheet to text or CSV format. I found that converting to CSV format with antixls worked, since afterwards I only needed to remove the comma at the end of each line with vi to put the email addresses in the text format I needed of one addres per line. Linear (unformatted) mode would also have worked well. As examples of the output from the program, below I've included the output in the formats the program can use for output. I placed the commands that produced the output above the output. The actual email addresses have, of course, been altered.

Sheet: 2005_All_Members
================================================================================
|OfficeE-mail                             |
|1pm4467@gw.njsp.org                      |
|1701A@dunbararm.com                      |
|1769B@dunbararm.com                      |
|aackorman2@sovlog.com                    |
|aaron.groom@pharma.com                   |
|b1smith@bulldog-tech.com                 |

Sheet: 2005_All_Members
(0, 0)          OfficeE-mail
(1, 0)          1pm4467@gw.njsp.org
(2, 0)          1701A@dunbararm.com
(3, 0)          1769B@dunbararm.com
(4, 0)          aackorman2@sovlog.com
(5, 0)          aaron.groom@pharma.com
(6, 0)          b1smith@bulldog-tech.com

Sheet: 2005_All_Members
OfficeE-mail
1pm4467@gw.njsp.org
1701A@dunbararm.com
1769B@dunbararm.com
aackorman2@sovlog.com
aaron.groom@pharma.com
b1smith@bulldog-tech.com

Site	antixls
Developer
MoonPoint

Download antixls

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