Can someone recommend a light program to read some Excel files?

[Syrinx]

I thought I would just boot into my seldom-used Windows 2000 partition and use an old version of Office to do what I need. But something is seriously wrong over there. I don't know if it's viruses or what, but with just about everything I try to run I get some kind of "invalid memory access." I don't remember the exact wording. I would just go ahead and reinstall Windows... I have no important data on the drive that it's on. But first I have to refresh my memory about the boot sector stuff. I recall that Windows is really greedy about the boot sector.

But anyway, to the main problem at hand. I'm not a regular user of spreadsheets, but I have a set of binary xls files that I need to get data from. Is there a lightweight Linux/Posix program that I could use to convert the Excel files to some simple format like CSV? I think OpenOffice could probably read the files, but that's overkill, since I may never need a spreadsheet program again. :)

Thanks for any advice.

[RoyGBiv]

1. Possibility ...

I've not personally tried this, but supposedly this package has a script that will do the work for you.

http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/software/catdoc/

Also not sure what the dependencies are, so it may turn into more of a chore than installing OO and doing it that way.

[Syrinx]

2. I'll take a look

Thanks!

[Syrinx]

3. It worked great!

Thanks again.

That program works great to turn xls files into csv files. (And it had ZERO dependencies.)

But it turned out that the original files were way messed up. I was eager, for some reason, to look at precinct-level voting results from my state for the 2004 elections. It turns out that each of the 67 county files are formatted differently. So it looks like my quest will be a long hard slog. ;)

The secretary of state is a Democrat but she doesn't seem real competent. I'll still vote for her in November because I want to fight Republican influence in the state. But darn it, it shouldn't be so hard to access and analyze basic public data.

[qnr]

4. Perhaps no one has ever brought the problem to her attention?

A nudge might help.

[Syrinx]

7. good idea

I will send her an email.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Glad it worked ...

Sorry your project is such a pain.

I'd tentatively suggest it's like that because different counties compile their own data according to their own methods and procedures, and no one at the state level bothers to standardize it. Well, maybe that's an obvious "duh" type of statement, but anyway. I've run into issues like this in Oklahoma when researching various things. I get accustomed to the way one county compiles data, then move on to another county and have to learn a whole new system. For most of this, I could never find a single resource for the data compiled at the state level and maintained with a single system.

To make matters worse, the way the data was compiled, maintained, and archived changed at times, usually coinciding with new leadership at the county election board.

This was all historical research, and I was kinda expecting it anyway since it's a consistent kind of problem I've encountered with all kinds of data ... and I have no good solution beyond compiling your own lists, which time consuming and obnoxious.

[Syrinx]

6. you're right, of course

It just looks like it would be so easy for the SoS to provide a template spreadsheet to the counties, and ask them to follow it. Oh, well.