Convert spreadsheets to CSV text files

The killer feature of this particular script is that it can convert multi-sheet spreadsheets into CSV files, either sheet-by-sheet, or all sheets at once.

Based on code from www.linuxjournal.com/content/convert-spreadsheets-csv-files-python-and-pyuno-part-1v2

General conversion.... enjoy!

(per the article)

Provide pairs of SPREADSHEET OUTPUT-FILE like this:

  $ LO_PYTHON libreconverter.py file1.xls file1.csv file2.ods file2.csv

Note that you'll need to determine the right path to the python executable bundled with LibreOffice to run this script properly. E.g. if libreoffice is located at

/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice

...then you'll want to use the python executable located at

/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/python

To select a particular sheet, you may append a number or a sheetname to the input filepath using a colon or @ sign:

  $ LO_PYTHON libreconverter.py file1.xls:1      file1.csv
  $ LO_PYTHON libreconverter.py file1.xls:Sheet1 file1.csv
  $ LO_PYTHON libreconverter.py file2.ods@1      file2.csv
  $ LO_PYTHON libreconverter.py file2.ods@Sheet2 file2.csv

To convert all the things, use %d or %s -- those will spit out files named by sheet number or by sheet name, respectively:

  $ LO_PYTHON libreconverter.py file1.xls file1-%d.csv
  $ LO_PYTHON libreconverter.py file1.xls file1-%s.csv

When using the %d format, you may include zero pad and width specifiers (e.g. %02d).

You may either run LibreOffice headless first (as a daemon), and then call this script, or you may let the script run LibreOffice itself.

To run the latest version of LibreOffice you have available:

walrus@lo:~/LibreOfficeDev4.2$ /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice --nologo --headless --nofirststartwizard --accept='socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100,tcpNoDelay=1;urp'

In a separate terminal window, invoke the libreconverter script using the path to the python (LO_PYTHON) bundled with the same version of LibreOffice.

If you haven't already started up LibreOffice, make sure that the variable _lopaths in loutils.py has been set to something reasonable that can find LibreOffice. Here's our current default:

# Find LibreOffice.
_lopaths=(
    ('/usr/lib/libreoffice/program', '/usr/lib/libreoffice/program')
    )

Now invoke libreconverter:

walrus@lo:~/some/test/dir$ /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/python libreconverter.py multi-sheet-spreadsheet.ods:2 output.csv

Good luck!