title: Programmatically extract data from an Excel spreadsheet
body: <p>Is there a simple way, using some common Unix scripting language (Perl/Python/Ruby) or command line utility, to convert an Excel Spreadsheet file to CSV?  Specifically, this one:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data/ie_data.xls" rel="noreferrer">http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data/ie_data.xls</a></p>
  
  <p>And specifically the third sheet of that spreadsheet (the first two being charts).</p>