Read Excel with Ubuntu

Open a terminal. Run the following command to make sure you have the packages curl and libreoffice-calc installed:

apt-get install curl libreoffice-calc

Then you can use CURL to convert the Excel file to CSV. You have to replace example.xlsx with the file you want to convert.

curl -F files[]=@example.xlsx -o

Now try to open the file It will contain CSV files. You can open these CSV files with LibreOffice Calc. Make sure you specify "comma" as column separator.

If you cannot open the file, there was probably an error and the file contains the error message. Open it with gedit to see the error.

That's it! You successfully read your Microsoft Excel file.

How does it work?

The RebaseData PHP client library internally uses our API to convert the Microsoft Excel file to a standardized format. Then you can read the data using PHP as shown above.

Why use RebaseData?