WINDOWS to UNIX : xls to csv

UNIX for Beginners Q & A UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers
1

Hi,
I need to ftp a .xls file from WINDOWS to UNIX. When I do it, the file coversion doesn't happen(??) or UNIX doesn't recognixe this format I know not. But there will be junk values in the ftp'd file.

Note: The ftp will be done by a script and I don't think we could place a WINDOWS script on this server to convert the file and then ftp to our UNIX server.

Please suggest...

Thanks and regards,
Gideon.

2

To transfer the file verbatum then use binary, however what application are you using on unix that can understand XLS files?

As a hint, go to a command prompt on Windows and do "type name.xls" to print the file out, that is what unix will see.

I personally use a OLE program that drives Excel to save the document as a tab delimited file, then transfer those to UNIX.

3

Hey,
I did not find the file as .xls in the WINDOWS command prompt but a .txt file though in reality it is an .xls file. Sounds strange right ?

But when I ftp'd the file I got the data as it was in the xls.

Thanks for the "hint". Worked for me :). Nevertheless if you could let me know more on OLE would be great.

Thanks and Regards
Gideon.

4

As in "Ole Automation", driving Excel using, say, Visual Basic, or C++ in my case.

5

Error Error Error,

Whatever I spoke in my immidiate previous post was incorrect. There was another .txt file in the same path, which was ftp'd and not the .xls

So sadly the problem still remains unresolved :frowning:

Porter,
Is it a software or something ??

Thanks and regards,
Gideon.

6

Yes, basically you create an object of "Excel.Application", then get the "Workbooks" object from that.

You tell the "Workbooks" object to

  1. "Open" "ReadOnly"=TRUE the file with a fully qualified path.

  2. "SaveAs" with "CreateBackup"=FALSE, "FileFormat"=-4158, and "Filename" as the target fully qualified filename.

  3. "Close" with "SaveChanges"=FALSE

That should do the trick.