Is there a tool to convert a large number of excel files into tab delimted files automatically?
I just through this together, its not pretty but should do what you need. Tested on WindowsXP / Office2007.
download from: http://stembro.byethost17.com/utility_scripts/xl2tab/xl2tab.html
Extract the xl2tab.vbs file to the directory containing the excel files and double-click to run. It will place the converted files into a new directory called "output." The original directory-structure remains intact within the output folder.
I don't think there are any good free tools to do so right now, but you could look into using the Open Office API to write something,
[http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=7657&highlight=convert+xls+csv+command+line][1]
Or for a quick and dirty solution, you could record and Open Office Calc macro that would do it, and launch that macro from the command line.
This might also help http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/unoconv/
convert to csv, and maybe replace , with tabs?
Related
I have done quite a bit of searching before posting this question so let me outline what I am trying to do.
1.) I do not want to use applications I have to download from a website or created custom commands (please no start Xls2Csv.exe here's a link to a website where you can download the program) I do not want to download a program to do this.
2.) I want to keep it in the batch file if possible - I have tried the vbc/vbs/vb files that is not what I am looking for.
3.) I found this an this is close to what I need but if I can stay within a batch file that would be best: Can a Batch File Tell a program to save a file as? (If so how)
Background
I have a bunch of test records stored in excel sheets within folders. Each test record has autoformatted name so the only real difference between any of the filenames is a serial number, otherwise each file name is formatted the exact same way.
I have written a batch file to search and find the files I need but I am stuck on obtaining a tiny bit of information in a .xls file.
What I am trying to do - I have excel files (.xls) and there is a word in a cell on one of many sheets that I would like to copy into a textfile. However I am unable to use findstr for an excel find because the command searches the file as if you opened it in notepad and the data I need is not present.
I am not concerned of data loss as long as I can get this tiny bit of information to a text file.
Otherwise what I have found to be the best solution is to convert an XLS to a CSV. I have manually done it by opening the file and saving as type .csv that worked.
What hasn't worked is:
example1.xls >> example2.csv
ren example1.xls example3.csv - this will save it as a csv file but still opens with the same formating of the xls file in both excel and notepad.
I was hoping that the was a command to recreate the manual process of opening the file and saving as csv.
If there are any other suggested solutions - maybe a command where I can search for a string within an excel file? That would be the simplest option.
I get a report from the companies servers (of which I have no control) in the form of grep txt dumps. I need to process them to get the info in a sane manner, which I use excel, and it works great.
Problem is, sometimes there are a few txt files that are broken, and cannot be processed with excel. Funny thing is, if I open them in notepad or something, copy all the data, create a new txt file, paste it all and there and process the new file, it works perfectly. Another curious thing is that when I do this, the new file which works, is a few kb's larger than the "broken" original.
My question is, is there a program, script or macro that I could use to
Open the text files in a folder
Copy the text of a file
Paste it in a new text file
Save that file with the same name as the original, in a different
folder
Rinse and repeat for each file in a folder
Any idea is a great help, I have thousands of files to sift through each month, and it really is quite a pain.
Turns out the files were in Unix format rather than windows one. I ran todos.exe and it fixed my problems.
I'm trying to convert a .xls file to .pdf using LibreOffice via command line on Ubuntu. I have a kind of report on the .xls file with some colors in the background of the cells and etc.
The problem is when I convert the .xls file, the .pdf loses the original format. Each page is broken almost in the half and the content of one page is displayed in two different pages.
Does anybody know how to convert the .xls file to .pdf via command line with keeping the original format?
Or some trick to set the size of the .pdf page to not break pages? (Also via command line)
The code I used to make the conversion was:
soffice --headless --convert-to pdf:"impress_pdf_Export" filename.xls
If you use LibreOffice to convert Microsoft Excel (XLS) files to PDF documents, this is a two-step process (even if your command does look like it is a one-step process):
Import the XLS into LibreOffice (even if started with --headless).
Export the PDF from LibreOffice.
If the result does not look like you expect (not similar enough to Excel's native PDF export), then start with debugging the first step from above:
Open the XLS file with LibreOffice in a GUI. Does it look like you expect it to look? Or are some formatting options looking weird?
Export the PDF from there (with the GUI). Are the page dimensions as you expect? Did you set them up how you prefer? The margins like you want them? etc.pp. ...
If you are working on Windows, you may also want to consider OfficeToPDF.exe. It is hosted on CodePlex, licensed with the Apache 2.0 License and available in binary and in source code.
It requires a working Office 2013, Office 2010 or Office 2007 installation. But then it can commandline- and batch-convert to PDF various MS Office-based file formats, including XLS(X), PPT(X), DOC(X), VSD(X) and PUB as well as Libre/OpenOffice-based ODT, ODS and ODC files.
Although this is a little bit off from the initial question (you don't _really need Office Libre if you have the Office suite and on a Windows machine)
I do appreciate the follow-up provided by Kurt. It prompted me to post the following Gist offering some clear instructions on how to go about using the .exe in a for loop.
https://gist.github.com/einsty/2189cae4175f619cff0f
Try copying appropriate font file (for me it's
a simsun.ttc file) to your libreoffice installing directory like '/opt/libreoffice4.2/share/fonts/truetype'.But if the width of a single excel sheet is too much for a print page(sth like 'A4'),it'll still collapse.
I'm looking for a way to have Excel files in my Matlab folder open 'outside Matlab' (i.e., by MS Excel in most cases) directly by double-clicking the file, rather than right-clicking and selecting 'Open Outside Matlab'.
The .xls files reader built in Matlab can be terribly slow for large files, and an unwanted double-click on a file can cost quite some time in which Matlab is unresponsive.
Thanks.
When you click something in the Current Folder tab, it's actually running the open command, which itself calls finfo to determine what it means by "open" for a given extension. You can see this by creating a breakpoint in open.m directly after the line [~, openAction] = finfo(fullpath); and double clicking - when it hits the breakpoint you'll see it returns openAction as uiimport.
In theory, you can create custom methods for extensions by creating on the path a function openabc where abc is the extension, which should be returned as the openAction.
However, if I look at my finfo.m it first searches for said functions and then regardless of whether or not it finds them if there is an inbuilt method it overwrites them with the standard behaviour. There's even a comment:
% this setup will not allow users to override the default EXTread behavior
If you are willing to muck about in the inbuilts, you may be able to do it like this (backup first! - this could affect other things). I did it temporarily by shadowing the existing finfo like this:
edit finfo.m (Now save a copy to the current folder)
Add these lines after the loop that defines the openAction (in my version, around line 85):
if any(strcmp(['.' ext], matlab.io.internal.xlsreadSupportedExtensions))
openAction = 'winopen';
end
From the folder containing your edited finfo.m, type which finfo -all. You should see two copies, the MATLAB one labelled as shadowed. Opening something from the current folder window should now open Excel externally.
I don't believe there's any straightforward way to do that. It's built in to MATLAB that Excel files will open in the import tool when you double click on them, and there's no way to change that.
You might be able to get around it by changing the file extension on your Excel files to something other than .xls or .xlsx. That would stop MATLAB from opening it in the import tool. Then in Windows, you could associate the new file extension with Excel.
Can anyone help with the following :
How to measure the sizes of the different files inside an .xlsx file while it is open for write in my excel?
As you already noted with your [zip] tag, .xlsx is actually a zip file. Therefore, even if the file is opened you still access it read-only and get the information you want.
I usually use the great Total Commander (the shareware is fully functional): navigate to the file and press Ctrl-Shift-ArrowUp and in the opposite window a new tab will open. In this tab, you can browse the .xlsx (or any other MS Office ZIP for that matter) as a normal folder, i.e. seeing it contents/file sizes/etc.