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Command line utility to extract data out of Microsoft Excel files.

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mitchpaulus/excelchop

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excelchop

excelchop is a command line utility to extract data out of Microsoft Excel files.

Motivation

I am an engineer who loves Unix utilities, but I'm forced to work in the Microsoft environment with Excel spreadsheets being my colleagues favorite tool. Following the Unix tradition, this program's sole job is to get information from the Excel file to standard output.

If you get some use out of this please Star it!

Usage

excelchop extracts data out of Microsoft Excel files and sends it to standard output. From here, you can pipe the data through other filters to achieve your goals.

By default, excelchop will return all the data within the first worksheet. Using the '-r' option, you can specify a subset range. You can either specify the range like

excelchop -r A1:B10 excelfile.xlsx

or you can allow excelchop to automatically find the last row. You can use the special range syntax startrow:startcolumn:endcolumn.

excelchop -r 2:A:D excelfile.xlsx

This will start at row 2, extracting data from columns A to D, stopping once it reaches a row in which all the values are empty or whitespace.

The default delimiter is a tab character and output records are separated by a Unix newline. excelchop also removes any newline characters within a field.

Installation

See the release page for downloads. There are releases for Windows, Linux, and macOS. For each operating system there is a standalone and framework dependent build. The self contained versions will run without any other prerequisites, but are larger in size. The framework-dependent versions require the .NET runtime be already installed.

  1. Extract the zip file.
  2. Move or symlink the executable file to a location in your PATH environment variable.

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