LibreOffice is definitely a reasonable way to do this. It can be called from a command line and so can be scripted. This will extract the first sheet of the script. There may be options to select other pages.
I'm a statistician and R is my primary tool. There are a number of R packages to read and write Excel files, primarily xlsx but I think xls is covered. R will certainly write to a PostgreSQL database, or pretty much any database. If your Excel files are in a purely tabular format, your job will be much easier.
I'm writing from my phone, but if you'd like details, let me know and I'll respond when I'm at my desk.
> Hi Catonano, > What do you mean with "access xls files"? > I interpret you question as "How can I open xls files with free software?" > And then my answer would be "Libre Office". But given the elaboration > further in your question, I don't think my answer is the answer you're > looking for. > So can you clarify? > > Regards, > > Kees Epema >
Thank you for your concern
There are some spreadsheets released by some governmental offices.
They are made of several sheets and each sheet contains mostly numbers and datetimes
I' d like to programmatically read those files, "massage" the data a bit and store the result in a postgresql based database
This could be done in 2 steps. First writing them as csv files, then reding the csv files and store the data in the db.
I just found a perl script that seems to do that. http://search.cpan.org/~ken/xls2csv-1.06/script/xls2csv
I just have to understand how to package that for GuixSD
But if you are aware of any other option, I' d be eager to know