Is there any way to combine 3 excel files into one comma separated file, after removing the header row from all the three files. Is this possible? I have looked in FAQ and I did not find anything.
Appreciate any suggestions or links to resources.
Radhika.
I am getting concerned now, so has no body done this type of thing before. Aren't there any resources to do this type of thing. any pointers is greatly appreciated.
Excel spreadsheets are a proprietary file format. So you can't just concatenate them together. You should load excel, select/copy the cells you want into one of the other spread sheets.
However, if you exported to a comma seperated format (which has nothing to do with excel now) then you could just:
cat file1 file2 file3 > file4
which would make one big file (called file4) containing all the data from file1/2/3.
Issue is:
I could do it manually by loading excel and deleting the header row and copying the cells into the other excel spreadsheet.
But, requirement is to automate the whole process of removing the header column in all three files, combine them into one file, store them as comma or tab delimited text file, so I could run my process which reformats the data.
Doesn't Excel have a builtin language just for this sort of thing? I belive its called VBA, http://www.excel-vba.com/
try that.
I don't know. I have to research that route also.
Since you are ready to do the internal processing of delimiters et al.,
on Linux, you could use open office and save the .xls as as .csv or .txt.
Then cat all the 3 files into a 1 file and then do the processing.
My 2 cents,
Vino
What do you mean when you say open office on Linux? Please explain.
He is referring to the free "Microsoft Office"-like office suite called "Open Office".
Check out http://www.openoffice.org/
VBA is capable of meeting your requirement. However, id you need a UNIX scripting approach, you are going to have to use OpenOffice. The only issue with OpenOffice is that when Microsoft alters the XLS file structure, you're going to have to keep your versions status quo until OpenOffice can catch up. VBA is less likely to be a problem in this regard. Excel can change all it wants but the VB code should stay essentially the same.
In UNIX how can I combine 4 excel files into a single workbook and each work sheet should go to a seperate sheet or tab with sheet name