Description

excel-preview is a small C command-line tool to preview xls or xlsx files.

It outputs the sheet name and the first ten rows from each Excel sheet.

$ excel-preview /path/to/file.xls(x)
Sheet: Sheet1
9822382285  Vishnu  9822382286                
9822382315  Gopal 9822382316                
9822382326  Hari  9822382327                
9822382345  Sanjay  9822382346                
9822382352    9822382353                
9822382383    9822382384                
9822382420    9822382421                
9822382472    9822382473                
9822382489    9822382490                
9822382507    9822382508                

(Each sheet begins with Sheet: and columns are separated by \t. Should be easy to parse!)

IMPORTANT NOTE

Unless you buy the full version of libxl, this utility will output garbage to your console. You have been warned.

Install

Download libxl from: http://libxl.com/download.html and extract to ./libxl

$ wget "http://libxl.com/download/libxl.tar.gz"

You need libxml-mac.tar.gz instead if you're on OSX.

$ tar -xvzf libxl.tar.gz
$ rm libxl.tar.gz
$ mv libxl-X.X.X libxl
$ make
$ sudo make install

Uninstall

$ sudo make uninstall