Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1042624
Accepted
Bruni
Asked: 2018-06-02 05:09:34 +0800 CST

How to split an ODS spreadsheet file into csv files per sheet on the terminal?

  • 772

I would like to split a spreadsheet (ods or xlsx) into multiple csv files, one for each sheet in the spreadsheet.

I would like to do this without launching a graphical app and preferably in a one liner.

Any ideas?

Though the linked duplicate provides a possible solution in one of the answers (not in the accepted one) and was helpful. The solution does not work with ODS files as I requested, and I consider the question to be sufficiently different.

command-line libreoffice xls csv

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well, libreoffice can convert documents from a script (i.e. in headless mode without opening a GUI). To convert any spreadsheet format to CSV, its simplest form would look like e.g.

    libreoffice --convert-to csv PATH/TO/YOUR.ODS

    However, this just takes the first sheet of your document and converts that, ignoring all others. It also lacks an option to select the sheet to convert, sadly.

    So we're going to need an external tool, like xlsx2csv. It's an open source Python (both 2 and 3) script that converts XLSX files to CSV, and supports extracting all sheets into separate files.

    Ubuntu already comes with Python installed, but maybe you need to install pip first, its package manager. I'm going for Python 3, but you could change all commands below to run it with 2 as well:

    sudo apt install python3-pip

    Then you can install xlsx2csv with pip3 into your user's package directory, using

    pip3 install --user xlsx2csv

    After that, the executable script can be found in ~/.local/bin/xlsx2csv.

    Now if you don't have it in XLSX format already, let's convert that ODS spreadsheet with libreoffice:

    libreoffice --convert-to xlsx PATH/TO/YOUR.ods

    Then we use xlsx2csv to extract all sheets. It will create a folder OUTPUTFOLDER and place all extracted SHEETNAME.csv in there:

    ~/.local/bin/xlsx2csv -a YOUR.xlsx OUTPUTFOLDER
    • 8

  2. Using xls2csv (to convert .XLS) tool of catdoc package install sudo apt install catdoc:

    xls2csv -b '
' EXCEL.xls | awk '{print >"sheet"NR}' RS='\n\n'

    This xls2csv -b ' ' EXCEL.xls reads MS-Excel file and puts its content as comma-separated data on standard output and with -b STRING we are telling sheets to delimited with what characters (or string; which we defined a actual newline here).

    Use xlsx2csv (to convert .XLSX); install sudo apt install xlsx2csv:

    xlsx2csv -s 0 EXCEL.xlsx |
    awk '!/,/ { nextSheet++; next } { print >"sheet"nextSheet }'

    The -s 0 means print all sheets.

    • 4

  3. Take a look at

    ssconvert -O 'separator=:: format=raw quoting-mode=never' -S x.ods  out%n.txt

    \thanks{Bruni}

    • -O 'separator= format= ...'is used to control the csv format details
    • -S to create a different output file for each sheet
    • 3