i am currently using a unix environment and will be constantly receiving documents in excel format(.xls) my question is
is there any tools that will do auto convertion of data in the excel doc into .txt?
ps.. my job are mainly for batch processing. thus it would be great if no manual work is needed.
thanks;) 
On a Solaris box you can import the xls sheet into Solaris using StarOffice.
xls2csv - program which converts Excel spreadsheet into comma-separated value file