Description
excel-preview is a small C command-line tool to preview xls or xlsx files.
It outputs the sheet name and the first ten rows from each Excel sheet.
$ excel-preview /path/to/file.xls(x)
Sheet: Sheet1
9822382285 Vishnu 9822382286
9822382315 Gopal 9822382316
9822382326 Hari 9822382327
9822382345 Sanjay 9822382346
9822382352 9822382353
9822382383 9822382384
9822382420 9822382421
9822382472 9822382473
9822382489 9822382490
9822382507 9822382508
(Each sheet begins with Sheet: and columns are separated by \t. Should be easy to parse!)
IMPORTANT NOTE
Unless you buy the full version of libxl, this utility will output garbage to your console. You have been warned.
Install
Download libxl from: http://libxl.com/download.html and extract to ./libxl
$ wget "http://libxl.com/download/libxl.tar.gz"
You need libxml-mac.tar.gz instead if you're on OSX.
$ tar -xvzf libxl.tar.gz
$ rm libxl.tar.gz
$ mv libxl-X.X.X libxl
$ make
$ sudo make install
Uninstall
$ sudo make uninstall