Very simple command line interface to the roo library, converts .xls or .xlsx files to .csv.
I have to do a lot of text parsing on spreadsheets. Opening them in excel and saving to csv is time consuming and Excel often munges accented characters. This utilty should convert Excel files to UTF-8 encoded CSV.
excel2csv uses the roo gem
gem install roo
excel2csv
Print the csv to std out
excel2csv file.xls
Write the csv to file
excel2csv file.xls out.csv